Death

by tmb1112

Death is a Quirk that can only kill. A perfect Quirk for a villain, but what if the boy who manifested that power just wanted to be a hero? Enrolling in U.A. might not be enough when all your Quirk can do is kill people. Follow Zach Sazaki from his first day in Class A on a story that spans years, as he learns to be a hero, finds out more about his Quirk, and too much to summarize!

214. Chapter 214

Disclaimer: I don't own Boku no Hero Academia

Chapter 214:

"Cloak to Command. Come in Command."

Mica Freeman turned to the computer on the right of the four screens he had in front of him on the bottom level of his personal command center. Above the middle two screens were two wider screens he had set up to add to six total. He had two mouses, two keyboards, speakers on the sides of the different screens, and he wore a headset with a microphone in front of his mouth as he heard the call coming in to him. His eyes only darted to that screen on his right for a moment before looking back at the top two screens again that he was sweating while looking at. "I hear ya'. Rebel here," he replied after a moment when he heard a click of Raylei about to call in again. "I'm the only one at Command right now. What's up?"

"Rebel," Gentle spoke over the line. Rebel grimaced more as he heard Gentle's voice and not just Raylei contacting him. In his peripheral vision he saw both Gentle and La Brava had jumped in on the channel with him and Raylei. "Something's happening above Korea. The Cloak is heading that way and we need-"

"Don't-" Rebel stopped as soon as he started talking. He tssked with the right corner of his lips pulling out into his cheek, as the people in the call with him were way too sharp for him to even try backtracking now.

Raylei stared at the screen in front of her with her eyes widening huge and then darting towards the middle of the bridge where Gentle stood up from the captain's chair. Gentle's voice got extremely low and dark as he asked, "What's happening?"

"Rebel! Do you know something about this?!" La Brava shouted in annoyance from another seat of the bridge as the other on-call support team member with Raylei right now. It was only the three of them on the bridge, and they had not called to the rest of the force yet despite already changing their course. La Brava continued snapping when Rebel did not answer immediately, "Shutting up for once?! What are you hiding?"

"Rebel?" Raylei asked in confusion.

"I've been watching it myself from a private cloaked drone-"

"Why do you have one of those without telling us-" La Brava started yelling at him.

"You need to stay away from there," Rebel said. He interrupted La Brava and the short woman froze with her eyes bulging at the tone in Rebel's voice.

He sounded scared. Raylei opened her mouth but hesitated, wanting to say something about it but too confused and stunned to come up with something quickly. Gentle did not falter though, and he growled at Rebel, "I told you to contact me and not Zach directly." La Brava spun towards Gentle as did Raylei a second later in shock and realization of what Gentle was suggesting.

La Brava asked in shock, "Is it Eziano-"

"I have no idea who that is fighting Zach," Rebel said while leaning back in his chair all alone at his command center. "But my drone just crashed, after catching… I don't even know what I just saw." Gentle's dark and angered expression flinched as he had never heard that tone in Rebel's voice before. He saw a blinking red light on the screens that kept appearing up on the windshield of the Cloak, flashing warning signs of emergency signals they picked up inside Korea. A window popped up on the screen showing a satellite image down above northeast Asia, zooming in specifically on Korea not that they could see much of the landmass in the north of the peninsula.

"Don't get involved here, Gentle. You'll just get in the way." Rebel grabbed his microphone and pulled it closer to his mouth in worry they would not hear him if he didn't. "Really," he muttered, sweaty and with anxious eyes as he watched the same satellite images showing what he had just seen from up close only visible from space. "You'll just get in the way. It's… It's like nothing I've ever seen before."

---

Over a four-way video call in Korea, the nation's four top heroes were speaking in an emergency conference. The fourth ranked Excelsior, third ranked Wonder Man, second ranked Bogseo, and the top hero in the nation Launching Hero: Cataphault were each on a corner of the screen when the fifth hero they just called up to add to the call responded. In a hero agency fifty miles from the large town of Pamdon, out in the Korean countryside instead of one of the mega-cities of the coast where the top four heroes' agencies all were, G-Man responded while his sidekicks and support staff were running around the agency behind him.

"Arung! Finish bolting everything down already! Sujin I cannot talk to the Captain right now- Just handle it!" G-Man finished shouting at his subordinates then spun to the huge screen in front of him that had the top heroes on it.

"What's going on over there G-Man?" Wonder Man asked in surprise at the chaos going on when G-Man picked up the phone.

"Are the quakes that much worse there?" Cataphault questioned, the top hero analyzing what was happening quicker.

G-Man nodded his head with a look to the top left screen where the number 1 hero of their country was looking at him. The top hero had wavy brown hair and darker skin than normal Koreans, along with a strange appearance as his arms were stretchy and did not fall normally down at his sides but lifted up over his shoulders and curved behind his back instead before dropping down. G-Man wore his hero costume of a black suit with his sunglasses on, and the man with short black hair had to reach forward and grab the long console under the screen to steady himself as another shake hit his building. He reported to the top heroes in the country, "We're analyzing the epicenters of these earthquakes-"

"Are those aftershocks?"

"They could be preliminary ones leading up. If the foreshocks are not as bad as one to come-"

"It's been going on for two minutes now, and I just felt that down in Seoul," Bogseo said. Seoul was the capital and one of the farther north of the large cities, which was why Bogseo felt the tremor the other three from cities farther south were only hearing about. "Was that the biggest one-"

"Listen to me," G-Man said. His tone stopped the other four heroes trying to figure out the situation of the earthquakes their agencies had picked up on in the north of their country. G-Man's tone was not rushed though or indicating that what he was about to say was about coordinating emergency efforts. His tone suggested something else. It was serious but to a level beyond that of a natural disaster, more like what he was about to say was something he needed the other four to shut up and listen to him about. "These tremors are originating from inside the Muindo Range." G-Man could see a map blinking over to his left, with red concentric circles emanating out and getting dimmer farther from the glowing dots, but more importantly he could see out the windows of his agency to the northeast side.

"What are you talking about?" Wonder Man asked confusedly, unsure as to what that had to do with anything.

Cataphault and Bogseo each felt differently though. They each reacted in ways that made G-Man's eyes narrow while shifting up to the top two boxes of his screen. His thoughts were shaken though as the ground rumbled beneath his feet though, and he heard a crashing sound in another room that got his staff yelling at Arung to hurry up and better bolt their furniture down. "The seismographs detecting these quakes are reading them strangely," G-Man continued while glaring at the top heroes in the nation. "Reading at lower on the Richter Scale than things are shaking up here. The ground itself isn't shaking at an evenly distributed rate as well-"

"Just come out with it," Bogseo snapped, sweat on the right side of his face as he already could tell what G-Man was getting at here.

"These quakes are unnatural," G-Man suggested. "Someone is at the source."

"Creating earthquakes?" Excelsior asked in disbelief. "Of this magnitude?!" He added, as it was not so hard to imagine someone having that power, but that it was being considered an emergency situation did make it seem impossible.

"There's a storm brewing above those mountains," G-Man added in a lower voice. Excelsior's shocked expression faded and his look got far more intense, as the member of the ADTF was well aware of a certain phrase. The other top heroes and G-Man had heard it before as well, and G-Man continued without touching on it, "I don't know why these earthquakes would be happening if it were just one villain out there right now."

"You think someone's fighting," Cataphault said. "And their clashes are… G-Man, coordinate evacuations around the Muindo Range. Get people to follow earthquake procedures and speak nothing of your hypothesis."

"It will only create a panic," Bogseo agreed. "I'll organize a force of heroes from Seoul and head out your way as fast as we can."

"I will send every hero who can fly to get there and assist with emergency protocols," Cataphault added. Then his voice got lower and he ordered to the other heroes, "But under no circumstances, is anyone to enter the Muindo Range."

"What-" Wonder Man started confusedly.

"I agree," G-Man said, and Wonder Man looked to the newest member of their conference call who was lower ranked among their nation's heroes. They all knew of G-Man's intellect though and the fact that his low ranking was in large part due to his location in the countryside. G-Man looked into Wonder Man's eyes and said sternly at the third-ranked hero, "Our priority has to be the safety of our people. Not one Korean citizen lives in the Muindo Range. I have long been investigating this phenomenon in absolute secrecy even from my own agency." The other heroes stared at him in surprise, and Cataphault and Bogseo even stared in shock with their eyes huge at G-Man's daring. "I suppose the two of you received visits from him at one point as well. I did not know he met with anyone other than politicians."

The top heroes stared at G-Man in disbelief. Bogseo finally asked slowly, "Were you, working with anyone-"

"None of the brass knew. No one knows," G-Man replied. "But it's the reason I'm really out here. It doesn't matter now though. Listen to Cataphault, Wonder Man," G-Man told the third hero in the country who was so confused as to what the others were talking about here. After hearing G-Man just say that it was why he was out in the countryside though, Wonder Man planned on listening without argument. "Treat this as a natural disaster and keep the citizens calm. Protect them at all costs. All we can hope, is that whatever is happening in there stays contained within the Muindo Range."

"And if it spreads out?" Excelsior wondered. "If whatever's causing this phenomena reveals itself-"

"Then God help us all," Cataphault muttered. Excelsior stared at him in shock, but Cataphault shook his head and shouted, "Now move! Coordinate efforts with the police and other heroes, and get the situation under control…"

---

In the sky over the Muindo Mountains, Zach Sazaki flew forward as a ten foot all man whose dark body was pulsing and blowing off wisps of Death above him and lagging behind his body with every movement he made. A huge swirling black mass continued to sway around below and behind him, while the sky full of dark clouds spun around a single point fifty meters ahead of him. Zach's red eyes glared out of his dark form towards where Ares was floating in a white aura that surrounded his body.

His glow filled the sky around him as the only light with so much darkness flooding the region from the dark clouds and Zach's Death body. Other than Ares the only bursts of light were from bolts of lightning that flew around him and some that crashed into his body itself. Ares did not even react when the lightning bolts crashed into him, instead just smirking more towards his enemy who had abandoned using a giant body when Ares flew around him attacking from all sides and never missing. Wind blew around them and pushed Zach's black aura that flared again as he and Ares floated fifty meters away from each other. A loud thunder crack filled the sky and a huge bolt of lightning dropped down behind Ares with branches breaking off of it as it cut through the air. The Death swirling below Zach crashed upwards as it swirled around like a raging ocean, and two thick black streams of it started rising from a lifting wave to pull up into Zach's back as he rose his arms in front of him.

Ares lifted his right hand with his palm up and his fingers curling in. Over his palm formed a ball of white light, and his aura flared behind him as he shot towards Zach and straight at his arms that he was funneling his Death into. "RAAAA! Death BEAM!" Zach fired Death out of his hands in a cone that expanded in all directions as it blasted out in front of him towards Ares.

Ares threw the sphere of white light forward and into the beam of Death that it split apart without slowing down. The energy flew forward and Zach pushed harder into his attack, but the ball of energy flew through it all the way to his hands and then ripped them apart along with his arms and his body behind it. Ares was rising up over the black beam of Death his energy ball ripped through, and he swerved around in the sky as despite his attack ripping through Zach, five new black figures flew up out of the splitting dark beam. Each of the black masses had four arms and spikes all around the top round parts of them resembling heads, yet those spikes protruded out and extended as their punches and kicks missed the lightning-fast enemy dodging around in the sky.

The supposed God spun and kicked his right leg towards two of the black forms that could not take the force of the kick and blew apart so thin that they started fading as they were blown backwards. Underneath Ares, five black spears suddenly shot out of another rising Zach that did not have glowing red eyes but was just a mass of darkness. That figure ripped apart into the black spears that sped up faster with better aerodynamics and less wind resistance. Ares created a flare of white energy out from below him that tore them apart though, as well as creating a wind over him that blew away the regular-sized version of Zach who just dropped out of the clouds with a burst of speed from the wings he flapped behind him.

Zach spiraled out through the air and snapped back open his red eyes to see Ares flying towards him. He kicked behind him and flapped wings he grew larger in that second to speed up faster than Ares would predict, but Ares punched his right fist forward as Zach did the same. Their fists smashed together in midair to a shockwave. Zach's red eyes widened, and he pushed harder while strengthening that arm and flooding more Death into it. Ares just smirked though while leaning forward, his arm bending as he pushed his face closer to Zach's that filled with more shock as pushing Death into his enemy did nothing. Ares punched forward and followed through, breaking apart Zach's arm and ripping through his shoulder and whole right side as his enemy went past him.

Zach winced and he regenerated that half of his body with more Death that pulled out of the rest of his body. Down below him at the same time, the Death ocean swirling around started pulling to either side away from Zach and Ares. It rose up with waves to their far left and far right to create walls on their sides. Then the top of the waves curved inwards so they were almost getting inside two barrels of the wave at once, and Zach flew forward while suddenly shooting up a straight wall of Death behind Ares to trap him.

There was only one place to dodge, and that was up. Ares just flew forward at Zach again though, and he swung his right arm up from behind his back. He windmilled it up with an open palm and then swung down in front of him, and a flash filled the sky which caused Zach's red eyes to start sliding up his black head. He looked up and then let out a roar of pain as a huge bolt of lightning slammed down into him, right before Ares ripped through the front of his body in the middle with a spinning kick to his gut. Zach reached back behind him as he was splitting apart though, and he grabbed Ares with his right hand. He held on for dear life and the the top half of his body was tugged out of the crashing Death waves that Ares left behind.

Zach's lower body bulged out of the split top half, and his right hand slid out of his darkness with his fingers curling in tighter on Ares' leg. Zach yelled out in a horrifying voice that echoed through the sky, "DIE!" Lightning crashed as Zach pierced his fingernails through his glove, even using some Death as sharp as he could to cut through the fabric that was no longer meant to slide away to allow his fingers to get through it. With his increased control over Death, he did not want that possibility of his fingers sliding out to instantly kill anyone. It was not supposed to be an option. Zach cut through the fingertips of his glove though and he gripped Ares' leg tighter, touching him with his bare hand…

Ares stopped flying. He paused in midair, leaned forward, and his right hand gripped on either side of Zach's black face that still showed his disbelief through the veil. Ares yanked Zach up by the head and held his enemy in front of him. Zach's right hand was yanked off Ares' leg, but he curled his left into a fist and slammed it forward with darkness swirling around but his arm actually there to make it harder. He pounded that fist forward and an explosion of Death blew out into Ares' chest and behind him as the fist collided. Ares did not even bother dodging. His aura just flared and the Death slamming into him pushed out in all directions, wind crashing into Zach and pushing his head back but not too far as Ares continued to hold a grip on him. A massive wave of Death was flying towards Zach's back as the huge mass of it that erupted from his body earlier was still under his control even if it was not inside his form, but Ares just chuckled as he stared into those red eyes staring back at him in shock from a foot away.

"Did you think Death would always work? On every enemy?" Ares' voice boomed across the sky and louder than the thunder that cracked above him. "You know that you need to use more Death on certain enemies than others. I know that much, so considering I am several thousand times as strong as any human," Ares lifted Zach up by the head. The movement was so fast that Zach was confused for a second at why he was no longer looking at Ares' face. Then he was thrown out of the air from above Ares head where the God had just risen him, and he slammed into a mountainside so hard that a fissure shot through it diagonally.

An avalanche fell from the top of the mountain and down over the fissure that was still splitting apart wider. Rocks broke apart from the fissure walls and fell down inside, and Ares rose his gaze from that area of breaking apart mountain to the huge mass of Death moving towards him that suddenly bulged up at the top. A fifty foot wide arm ripped out of the Death and reached out towards Ares, then the upper body of an enormous black mass emerged with glowing red eyes at the top of it glaring towards his enemy. Zach broke apart that massive arm that shot Ares' way and attacked with a dozen smaller arms that his enemy flew around on a path towards his rising form, punching away or even letting Death slam into him only for him to break straight through them on a direct path in his direction.

Death isn't killing him! IT'S NOT WORKING! Zach's eyes darted to his right where Ares just flashed over to, then up above him as the villain was up there with both hands risen above his head. He brought those hands down and the swirling energy he condensed there smashed down on Zach's huge form, sending the beast of Death crashing down into the mountain range below. Zach fell into a forest that died as the ground below it cracked and blew apart. Huge chunks of forest, trees and roots and all, rose up in the air while cracking and breaking into cubes. Zach rose his upper body up as Ares was dropping out of the air, lightning falling behind him slower than the God himself was moving.

A pair of legs slammed into the middle of Zach so hard that it ripped through his huge body and the ground below. Four cracks split off from the crater, then the crater dropped down a second time into a deeper one with those four cracks each splitting wider and causing the chunks of ground that were split to rise and fall at different elevations. The top of the fourth tallest mountain in the range, Uingo, cracked and started a rockslide to mix with the avalanche already rolling down the slopes of the mountain.

Zach's body was ripped apart in the middle, but the outsides of it all sucked in quickly towards the point that Ares was imbedding into the ground. Zach did not waste time by surrounding him first only to let Ares fly out through one side, he just attacked with everything he had at once. Waves of Death shot in at full speed, with a few rising up instead of just zipping straight at Ares like he was a magnet. Those other waves just rose up to prevent him from rising, but Ares went down instead of up anyway. He dropped down into the ground, speeding his way through a tunnel that formed ahead of his body and that Death chased through after him but could not keep up with the villain who emerged behind where Zach was standing up with a seven foot tall figure again.

"Can't control this form very well, can you?" Ares wondered from behind his enemy who did not even know Ares had risen behind him yet. Zach turned his head and looked back where that man was floating a few feet off the ground above the hole Zach still had Death flooding through too far back to know Ares' intended final destination. "You're using your eyes too much. Needing a form like this in order to control where your Death goes. It's what you get from a lack of training with your Limiter 0 down."

Zach spun and slashed back his right arm that transformed into a sword in mid-swipe. Ares rose his right arm and pushed against the side of the blade that moved slower than his arm rose, allowing him to redirect it so the sword just slashed down on his right side and into the floor next to him as Zach was unable to stop it at how fast he attacked. Zach's head even leaned down as he missed his swipe and stabbed his sword into the floor, making him look back up to see Ares floating inches in front of him and staring down with a confident but not smug look at his enemy. "Keep that in mind for next time."

"There won't be a next time," Zach growled, his black mouth moving but lagging behind his deep voice. Black steam shot out of his mouth and at Ares who punched his left fist in a hook for the side of Zach's head. Zach focused more Death down below his head in his shoulders, and as his head was ripped apart he immediately reformed it above his neck- only for Ares' left leg to kick it apart again with Zach having no immediate plan to regenerate this time. Then Ares smashed both fists down on the rest of Zach's body, and on the floor below him where a huge mass of Death was swelling and getting ready to shoot up around Ares and crash down on him.

The smash of both of Ares' fists broke apart the earth and separated the mass of Zach's Death that now had too many sections to control while not even having a full body to coordinate it. He had no brain or head, and Zach felt himself losing his thoughts as his entire body was destroyed. Focus! Don't die! Parts of his separated body started to fizzle out and fade without a constant stream of thought keeping them together. He reconnected part of himself in an especially condensed mass of Death, and he thought in a panicked and rushed way, I can't do that again! I barely found my way back here! It was only by not having coherent thoughts for a few seconds there and remembering that moment in which he was barely functioning that he realized just how close to death he had just been himself. I almost died. Holy shit. Could he have killed me? "Next time?" What the hell is he playing at?!

Zach sucked more and more Death into his body this time. The huge mass of it that was still swirling around him and reconnecting while chunks of earth fell back down around him pulled into a single point without making his body that much larger this time. I can't get it all back inside. Not after releasing my first limiter. Limiter 0… I haven't had to use it all since the Battle of the 6 Armies. I never thought I'd have to use it again. I never thought I'd have a chance to, as I can't use it in a populated area where I need full control over Death to make sure I don't kill anyone. Even dropping Limiter 1 outside Desusuta was dangerous, but that was the point of making Limiter 1 in the first place. A stronger version as strong as I could get but with full control. This is just, Zach pulled more and more back inside himself, but his insides were so condensed with the swelling Death now that his body was pulsing with it and getting larger on its own. Alright, focus. Fight. Kill him. How? I don't know.

I have to figure it out though. Zach flew up into the sky with a thick trail of Death following behind him. It looked more like a long tail now that stretched all the way to the ground before lifting up a few seconds after Zach had flown into the air, making it a hundred meters in length easily. He shot up into the sky after Ares who floated above the east slope of a mountain looking down at Zach as he reconnected his body and tried to control more of it, as Ares just suggested he do.

Zach flew up towards Ares though kept a gap between them as he rose to the man's level and was not instantly attacked. "I'll admit, you are the strongest enemy I've ever faced," Zach started as he hovered ahead of the God of the assassins.

"Of course," Ares replied back to his enemy whose appearance was more humanlike than before. He showed more features on his black form with the long wide tail than earlier, and his red eyes glowed brighter as he faced his enemy from fifteen meters apart. "War did that to me. As your Quirk does for you." Ares smiled to the boy before him who he spoke to in a friendly yet competitive way, and also as if he was passing on wisdom, "Not just my strength and speed, but everything advances with every war in the world. My recovery time, my stamina, all of my abilities become better. My reaction time is quicker. Even my body started to heal faster and faster, to the point where I can now just regenerate from small wounds in seconds. Tell me, Zach! How is that wound Nuomo and Danny gave you faring?!"

Zach leaned his head back and then darted his eyes down. He won't attack me, Zach knew it when he hesitated, and then he pulled all of the darkness away from his upper stomach where Nuomo's blade had cut through before he turned his insides to Death. He had already noticed a lack of pain during his fight with Eziano, and when he got cut in the head and considered his blood loss, he had checked down below and seen that he was no longer bleeding. Ares called out to his enemy as Zach checked the wound that had already scabbed up, but that scab was starting to look old. "Well?!" Zach reached his hand in and scratched off the scab. Ares' laughter bellowed into Zach's ears as did the following shout, "See that? It's already scarring up below!"

Zach lifted his gaze up to see Ares looking at him with a huge grin of amazement. "You are remarkable," Ares complimented, shaking his head in sheer excitement at the sight that Zach re-covered up in darkness anxiously at the expression on Ares' face. "It took me at least a thousand years to accumulate half the scars that you have on your body. But then again, I had never fought quite the war you had. My enemies could not compete with me or damage me after the first hundred years or so, and my worst scars came from assassins. As some of yours have as well."

Zach breathed heavily and his black breath hovered in front of his face then pulled back into him. His body pulsed with his dark energy, and he glared into the shining eyes of his enemy who could not hide how much fun he was having. "Is this all a game to you?!" Zach yelled towards Ares, a shakiness in the rage of his scream. Ares rose his eyebrows and smirked more, and Zach leaned forward and yelled, "Your assassins killed thousands-"

"Millions," Ares corrected. "Billions, if you consider all those they could take credit for."

"'Billions?'" Zach repeated in disbelief. He's exaggerating. How many people have even lived for that to... There's no way!

"Probably," Ares replied with a shrug, as if the exact number did not even matter but that it was just so high it could likely be in the billions. Zach dropped his jaw in shock, and Ares lifted his palms up defensively with more of a shrug of his shoulders. "Come on now. Why not enjoy this? I can tell you that there's no one around to get dragged into our fight. No one for a few dozen miles in any direction of my home. So you don't have to worry about dragging innocents into this fight! Which means you can just go all out, and have fun!"

Zach shook his head, his teeth grinding behind the dark veil as he considered the implications of what Ares was shouting. "The War of Unification helped reduce the population around my home," Ares admitted with a tilt of his head to the right. "But these mountains have been my homeland for over 800 years now. Those Koreans started encroaching on my lands, and so they needed to be culled." Ares said it casually in a voice that shook Zach in his core at the innocent and uncaring nature of the statement. "So I had them massacre each other, and then while they were distracted, a younger Eziano created famine across the nation. With an elite team of assassins, they killed the crops and made the country starve. It was a tactic of his father Enzo that Eziano reproduced nicely."

Ares sighed for a moment nostalgically, then he started in an explanatory tone to the boy before him he seemed to care about explaining to, "Enzo was, he was just an insatiable genius. The most brilliant of the family. Enzo was far superior to his son in intellect, and in… creativity." Ares sounded like he was bragging about it, and he admitted aloud, "He even surprised me at times." Ares lowered his smile and then continued, "Eziano was strong, but he was too pious. Which kept us from being close."

"Aurellio knew me well. We were friends, and so Enzo was raised by a man who knew me personally. He was like a nephew to me," Ares said, but his frown just grew deeper as he said it. "The last true human who I could relate to in any way," he said in a cold voice that sent chills down Zach's incorporeal Death body. "Enzo raised his son to know that I was a God though, and Eziano never saw someone who treated me more of an equal as Aurellio was oft to do in front of Enzo."

"I have long lost any love I once had for humanity," Ares admitted to the teenager in front of him. "But you," his voice rose in tone with a smile reappearing on his face. "You are no human."

"Shut up," Zach growled. "I am-"

"You're just like me," Ares cut him off. "A God among men."

"SHUT UP!" Zach's body split into three. The other two versions of himself flew to the right and the left, flapping pairs of wings behind them in symmetrical movements that had Ares' eyes darting left and right. Swords formed out of their right hands, while Zach slashed in front of his center self with two forming black scimitars that solidified but still wisped the excess darkness he could hardly contain as more flooded into his back from the huge condensed well behind him.

Zach shot forward while his two flanking versions flew in from Ares' sides. Ares had all dimensions of movement however and just shot straight up, making the three Zachs fly up at him from below on different sides making a triangle around the rising enemy. Ares flew into the clouds above that were pushing and pulling with strong winds. Zach flew up with all three split versions of himself, and he focused hard to see with the other two versions despite them having less Death inside them. I can be mostly in here, and still partly in each of those. Transfer my consciousness without being physically connected. Jump to each, and control all at once!

The version of Zach that had flown off to Ares' left initially spun to the side and rose his sword as a path parted through the clouds. Two more arms ripped out of his chest as he rose the sword above his head, extending forward at Ares who just sped up to hit him in the torso. Ares did a spin dodge to the left of the extending arms that ripped apart and yanked after him in a sharp movement instead of curving around. At the same time that Zach slashed the sword down at his enemy who rose up over the yanking Death wind and just above the tip of the sword now passing right in front of his chest.

Ares was flipping over the top of the sword that started doing the same as the extra arms to rip apart and pull after him, but it was the second version of Zach that had gone on Ares' right that shot out of the thicker clouds Zach added Death to in order to prevent Ares from seeing that second version approaching. That second Zach kicked over the top of the head of the one slashing the breaking sword, intercepting Ares' leg that just pushed down on his kick anyway and smashed one black leg into the other's head. Those two Zach's merged together though with eight arms pulling out of their sides at once and wrapping around Ares. Before they could finish an eight-armed bear hug around him though, Ares kicked his left leg up and split the reconnected more condensed version of Zach in half vertically.

The Death split apart so fast that Zach lost control over it as he was no longer controlling from inside that mass but from his other version still flying into the area. He could not see all his Death well in the clouds to control it, and Ares could tell as the Death swirled and shot around as if trying to hit wherever he could dodge to, yet he was finding it much easier to dodge Zach now. He turned his head and sped towards a point in the clouds, raising his right and left hands in front of his body and slamming them forward right as Zach came out into the gap in the clouds created by their attacks. Zach's red eyes bulged and his body sharply pulled to the left, making him look rubbery between his head and legs as his body just bent one way to dodge the beam flying at him.

That beam Ares fired out of his hands whipped up as he yanked his arms upwards, dragging the beam with him and making Zach pull as hard as he could after the rest of his body he had dodged with. He spun around as he pulled his head after his torso that had continued its momentum forward with a blast of Death out of his back. He finished with a left elbow above Ares' arms, taking away some of the Death there and hitting him with the hard steel while firing a blast of blue energy out of that arm at the same time. The elbow gained speed at the last second and indented into Ares' face, and then Ares punched up with his own left fist and hit Zach in the arm that just hit him.

The force of Ares' punch knocked Zach much higher in the air, but he caught the glimpse of pain on Ares' face for a moment when his elbow had collided. He winced harder though as he lowered his left arm down, and he turned his arm to the side while pulling more Death off it only to stare with his eyes huge at the fist-sized dent left in his prosthetic. He, dented it? With just the half-punch from that weird angle- Zach fully turned his arm into Death along with the rest of his body as Ares flew out of the nearest cloud on his right. He thought he could still see Ares in his peripheral vision down below, but his enemy was fading from there with a smirk up at him while his actual body just connected with Zach's and sent him soaring back out of the clouds.

Zach? Where are- Midoriya spun his head to the right while on the slope of a mountain he was trying to locate the fight from. His head snapped after the black blur that just shot out of the clouds and all the way to the side of another mountain in the range, where Zach collided with but on a weird angle that made it seem more like a graze. He hit the mountain and just by grazing it he dug an eighty meter trench through it that ripped huge chunks of stone up in the air and blasted a portion of the other side of the mountain off where Zach had dug too deep before exiting that side. Midoriya spun from the rain of huge rubble flying off that mountain to the clouds that left a hole below them where Zach just came flying, Death trailing after him and trying to keep up with the physical body that just got hit.

Out of that hole descended a muscular figure in a black t-shirt and baggy pants whose body seemed to exude an aura of pure power. He was smiling. Even from a distance, Midoriya could see a smile that did not appear evil. There was no malintent in his appearance. It was similar to how Midoriya thought he looked back inside. A different kind of feeling than All For One had given off that day in Camino Ward. He's more powerful than All For One, even though he's… What is he? All For One may have lived for nine generations, but I already accepted Eziano could possibly be older. Yet this? This man, if he's as old as he says he is, and Quirks have really been around for that long- No. That's not, possible.

Midoriya's legs felt heavy as he stared at the descending figure whose expression did little to ease the fear he felt. I have to join in the fight. I moved all the assassins to an area debris shouldn't fall down on them, and now I need to fight this guy. Help Zach, because he can't do this on his own- Midoriya's eyes grew wider and darted every direction, as his enemy vanished from sight. He spun to the left as he caught sight of the blur of light trailing after where he must have just flown. Am I that much slower?!

Zach dragged himself to his feet, and more and more Death filled into him as he breathed heavily and glared up from on top of a huge boulder just ripped from a mountain. He ground his teeth while more Death available for use in fighting filled him, not withheld behind walls and limiters, just condensed inside his body. The boulder below his feet started to cover in Death that spread out from under his soles. The surface of the boulder bubbled with Death, dark wisps coming off and not fading as they rose into the air around him and even in front of his face where heavy steam hovered already.

"Are you getting into it now?" Ares taunted down, though it sounded more like a friendly competitive tease than a malicious taunt of Zach's weakness. "Or was that before really all you could show me?!"

CALM DOWN! Don't move at his pace. Zach was losing his train of focused thoughts as rage and a much different and scarier feeling had filled him. The smile under his black veil dropped hard and he bit down in frustration while Ares lowered his own smile too in a disappointed way. "Why me?" Zach asked. The question caused Ares to raise his right eyebrow at the teen who snapped at him for that confused eyebrow raise, "Why are you…" Zach pursed his lips, telling himself again that he was speaking up like this to gain a moment to strategize, to use the fact that his enemy wanted to talk to him to his advantage. Yet the things he was asking he could not convince himself that he was not desperately invested in. "Why not Midoriya? Or All Might? Why not All For One for that matter or-"

"None of them are Gods," Ares replied.

"Neither am I!" Zach shouted back. "And you- you killed Eziano. Someone you've known for hundreds of- since he was a child?! Your friend's grandchild? You raised him!" Zach shouted this and searched for a look on Ares' face to suggest that what Zach was saying was not the case.

Ares just stared blankly back at Zach for a few seconds, then he shrugged his shoulders and said, "So what?" Ares sighed and rolled his eyes at the dark figure's low growl of anger at that reaction. "I keep forgetting you're still so young. To me, you're already my partner."

"What?!" Zach snapped at the nonsense his enemy was spouting.

"To travel through time with," Ares continued as if that explained it. "The two of us, it's a future I can see going on for… for a lot longer than anything else in this world. Nothing's a constant. Nothing except for me," Ares paused and he cracked a slightly bigger smile again. "But that's changed. Your Quirk reminds me of my own. Your exponential rise in power. Raw power." Ares chuckled while Zach felt the pit of despair in his body clench up and start strangling him. "You don't realize it yet because you're so young, but you've stopped aging. That power of yours has made you immortal! Just like me."

"How could you possibly know that?" Zach demanded to know. "You're just assuming-"

"Maybe!" Ares yelled back. He rose up his right hand and pointed his palm at Zach, "But I have hope! For the first time… in longer than I can remember!" Ares yelled in a sudden rage that had his face twisting in distortion. The sky cracked above him and Ares had to shout over the thunder of the storm, "Because you surprised me! You don't understand how long it had been!" Ares dropped that hand and stopped himself, deciding against attacking as he shook his head around and looked at Zach with softer eyes that made the teenager pull back so far at the look.

"What?" Zach's deep voice cracked at this man's confrontation.

"Humans have bored me for so long! Enzo, he really was the last," Ares said with a shake of his head and frustrated tone in his voice. "His creativity led him to do things I had never seen people do before. A cruelty I never even believed possible. Enzo, he created the first real human experimentation labs. I mean, this was the stuff of legend!" Zach stared with shaking eyes at the amazement in Ares' voice towards something he himself found as the most horrifying things he had ever witnessed. "People had been killing and torturing each other for millennia, but Enzo was different. Even the most brutal dictators and kings cared at least a little about their people, about some of their people. They cared about who they were sacrificing, or how many… Enzo, he just experimented. With his goal being testing the hypotheses he wanted to prove. He used humans as if he were not one himself. And it didn't matter who they were! He would test on kings and prostitutes, priests and beggars alike. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them over the thousand years he lived for-"

"He was a monster," Zach gasp-snarled at the sound of this. "Evil- insane!"

"Brilliant!" Ares countered back with a laugh at those other terms Zach used for him. "Enzo could still surprise me even after I'd been around sixteen hundred years! After two thousand years! He was far more brilliant than you, and I admit your brilliance has stunned me at every turn! That this world could still produce someone like you!"

"Shut up! Don't compare me to him!" I can control it! I was gaining better control over the separate parts of myself! Zach's eyes glowed red and he tried to distract himself with his strategies despite how caught up he was getting in what Ares was telling him. Attack from all sides while creating walls around, then when he can't see past the walls make more… what?

"Using his labs, Enzo created the first biological weapons. And the world never even knew it was man-made. A plague, he told me." Zach was frozen in place as Ares smirked at him and recounted this amazing event he knew Zach knew nothing about. "One he spread using the Mongol hordes and barbarians to a world progressing too fast and too peacefully that he knew my strength would not be increasing as fast as it once did. At the onset, Enzo explained to me that the tens of millions he had killed with the Black Plague meant nothing to him. He knew it would wipe out two thirds of Europe, our homeland, but as he explained to me, it was all in perpetuation of future holy wars that his father had failed to reach the extent of. Enzo believed that the Crusades Aurellio perpetuated at the end of his long, long life were failures. Failures because the Christians and Muslims didn't hate each other enough."

Ares chuckled again and told the confused boy in front of him, "The things he talked about were so far beyond what I myself had thought of, and Enzo was still a young man at this time! Imaginative, creative, and brilliant. He knew that by following certain hygienic practices, people would be able to survive his plague. Unfortunately for the Europeans, only the Jews were that cleanly. So Enzo knew that all across Europe the Jewish population would be the ones the be surviving while the majority Christian lands fell victim to his new weapon." Zach's jaw dropped as did Midoriya's where he was hiding behind a rock behind Ares with his back to it and a terrified look on his face.

"I don't… believe," Zach started.

"Of course you do!" Ares called back at the kid in front of him. "Because you know how easy it is for people to turn on each other from fear alone! Instead of it being Quirks that made them turn on each other though, it was religion! They blamed the Jews for being monsters and witches because they were the only ones surviving! Those who didn't understand why the Jews were living and their families were not got jealous, and then afraid, and HATEFUL! And for centuries and centuries following that hate was passed down. And the Jewish people who survived passed their own hatred for the inquisitions that followed and the massacres of their people, and then real stories happened that were spread down more from hateful people hurting others who had done NOTHING to them! Violence incites violence and hatred breeds hatred! And for a thousand years Enzo saw the results of his actions as we sat back together and watched as armies burned and nations FELL and bombs that could annihilate entire cities DROPPED TO THE CHEERS OF BILLIONS ALL AROUND THE WORLD!"

"YOU FUCKING BASTARD!" Zach's feet broke the floor below him and Ares' eyes shot open wide at the eruption of Death that just exploded out from Zach's body and mainly from his back.

Zach shot forward at rocket speeds into his enemy who he slung his arms around that had lost most of their darkness that could not keep up with him. Midoriya leapt away as Zach tackled Ares into the floor creating an explosion of Death close to his friend who had to leap away again as a wave of Death yanked after where Zach dragged Ares through the earth. Ares flipped over as Zach continued to slam him through a trench into the mountain, and Ares punched Zach in the chest once, twice, then gripped him around the face and flew farther into the mountain while yelling in the darkness, "You only hate me now because you still care about the value of human life! It means NOTHING to men like us!"

"SSNNRR-NNUP!" Zach's head exploded into Death with Ares hand falling through it and slamming into the ground, then the older man spun around and looked back through the tunnel they had bored into the mountain. Ares' eyes widened again as his enemy had only kept his head that solid for so long to let Ares get so much farther into the mountain. A different version of Zach back far down the tunnel slammed his hands forward. "DIE!" He screamed while filling that collapsing tunnel with Death that shot after Ares and made it so the villain would have to fly back through all that Death to- Ares flew upwards and then back right over the tunnel below him that was getting full of Death.

Even as Ares flew through a newly forming tunnel above the first one though, Zach dragged his Death upwards and through the solid ceiling falling apart above him but staying mostly strong as the mountain was too secure to just break apart like that. Ares glanced down as he flew back through rock that broke apart around his body, and he readjusted up a little higher as the Death was seeping through ground that did not have many cracks in it. Ares emerged from the mountain and slammed his right hand forward in a fist, punching away the huge black sword swinging down at him. He spun and punched five more times, and the thin lines of Death shooting through the air to pierce the God ripped apart and blew away too.

"Why do you fight me so savagely?" Ares called down towards his enemy who was flying up at him. Ares flew higher while looking down at the teen who sped up more to keep up with him, only for Ares to speed up faster again.

Instead of just firing Death out of his feet, six huge wings giving him a twenty-five meter wingspan slapped down after tearing out of his back. He continued to blast Death out from below him too then controlled that Death and added it to a huge mass he had left down on the ground level before flying up. That mass was now raising but staying far enough behind Zach that Ares could tell it was not for any imminent strike. "I have thousands of years of experience, but I was already a master of combat long before anyone called me a God!" Ares announced down as the sky rumbled above him again, clouds shaking at the sound of his voice. Zach continued to fly up at him, and Ares shouted at the teenager, "A hero of the Greek cities! Epics were written about me and my children who were born with amazing abilities! Slaughtered by people jealous of us, who I still tried to love!"

"You loved people?!" Zach shouted up in disbelief as if that were the craziest thing Ares had said so far.

"Of course I did!" Ares yelled back, his face dropping for a moment with a darker look flashing on it before returning to what it just was. Zach slowed down and the Death far below him stopped accumulating and moving too as he stared in surprise up at the leader of the assassins who moments before had been talking about holy wars and plagues that he had enjoyed. "I was human once," Ares said as if that was all the explanation he needed, which to Zach it was and made the teenage boy hesitate more at the sound of it. "But after too long of not feeling certain things that make one human, I can no longer associate with them at all. I am sure you've already begun to notice it. The excitement of a good fight. Fear that one can kill you. Fear that people have and expect you to feel in circumstances that you no longer feel fear in! I watched you fight those who called themselves the Subspace Devils."

Zach flinched at how knowing Ares' voice sounded about things that he wished he could just deny as being untrue. He knew it before Ares even continued, as the God wondered his way, "You fought them all without killing a single one. You did the same with the assassins back there! You wished your fight against Eziano would be different- Was it?!" Ares yelled to Zach who rose higher to put himself at the same altitude as the villain. "But here I am, forcing you to fight at your strongest! And you, pushing me to fight at a level I have not had to fight at EVER in my life!"

"Before I kill you," Zach started, his voice low and his red eyes dark as he started that to the villain who stared at him in shock at the way Zach responded to all of that. "Tell me," Zach continued. "Are there any other fake Gods out there?"

"I am not a 'FAKE' God!" Ares yelled back. Lightning cracked through the sky above him and dropped down at his back, and his body flared with a white aura larger than it had been earlier at the same moment that Zach started bring all the Death up at once from down below them. Ares' face distorted with anger at the question Zach had, and his voice boomed over the sky as he roared at his opponent, "But NO! There are no others! At least, I have never seen anyone else… I am ALONE! The only one with this kind of power that has made me immortal. I no longer care about humanity because I understand that it is fleeting, as you will come to-"

"I will never be like you-"

"You will!" Ares yelled back. "You will spend your eternity watching everyone you care about die! You will live alone. With no one in the entire world who can understand you. Stand beside you! No one who knows what it's like… Except for me!" Ares shouted, and he flew forward at Zach with a huge grin on his face. Zach shot back towards him at the same time while all the rising Death sped up and pierced into the sky far from the two of them curving like a net from below to up in the clouds above. Ares punched a fist at Zach while still eight meters off, and the wind force slammed Zach backwards as Zach was flying forward. Zach's momentum changed and then changed again as Ares rose above him and kicked down.

Zach's wings were still sticking out of his back and all six flapped down right before he was going to hit the bottom of his own net. Can't leave this gap! Zach shot back into the sky for a frontal assault while the bottom of his net continued to rise up after the ten different thick pieces that got thinner as they spiked up into the clouds. He shot towards Ares and yelled out at the supposed God, "You think I would want to spend an eternity with you?! You who I know were responsible for so many wars-"

"War happens whether or not I push it!" Ares yelled back.

"But you do push it!" Zach shouted.

"Why shouldn't I?!" Ares called out. He swung his right elbow towards Zach and hit him in the face with the blast of force that came off his arm as he swung it before Zach could reach him and punch with his own flaring right arm. Ares swung a second before his enemy and hit him backwards with enough force that Zach's finishing punch fired off the Death from too far, allowing Ares to fly up over it and above Zach's head in the same moment. His dodge and follow-up punch down at Zach's lifting face sent his slower opponent flying out of the air again. Ares dropped down below Zach and yelled out as he wound up with his hands together and his body spinning around, "As God I have the right to make myself stronger!" He swung and slammed his connected fists into Zach's back.

Zach's body split apart as Ares' arms collided with him. He ripped himself in half and then reconnected around Ares' arms, bringing both arms up above his head and forcing a wave of Death forward while tightening his Death body around the arms plunged into him. Zach swung his own arms down, but Ares ripped his arms left and right and swung up and down, dispersing all the thickening Death on him. Zach had condensed it too much, and he growled out in pain as that body was ripped in different directions by the tugs of Ares' arms.

"For that reason," Zach's voice came out of different pieces of the black clouds that had dispersed around Ares. The "God" darted his eyes around at the sound of that deep voice coming from different sides of him, a more intense look forming on his face as instead of fading, each of those clouds started bulging and growing larger. "You killed so many people?"

Five different black bodies formed flying around Ares in a sky full of fast winds slamming into the fighters. Ares' body spun around and he spoke while facing all of the five dark figures whose bodies condensed and solidified more though with none of them having glowing red eyes. "I have long lost any love I once had for humanity. They are fleeting creatures. Weak. Prone to war at the simplest actions. It didn't even need to be from me." Ares paused and then smiled more smugly as he called to one of the versions of Zach, "You saw how easy it was for a nation like Yemen to fall into civil war! A push from one assassin."

Lightning flew out of the sky and around the six of them flying up there. Ares shouted over the sound of the crashing thunder that came right after those bolts fell, "If humans are that predictable, that easy to manipulate, as I know you are well aware of…"

"That doesn't make them worthless!" Zach yelled from the body directly behind Ares who spun around to face that one instead of the other dark forms floating there. The red glow faded from that Zach's eyes though and reappeared on the one to its left, making Ares shift his gaze while lowering his smile more though gaining an even more impressed look. "There are good people-" Zach continued from that other body.

"There are good dogs too!" Ares called back with a laugh at that version which lost its glowing red eyes and made Ares search for the real one Zach's consciousness was moving into next. Zach watched Ares from two different angles as he switched over to different bodies he was controlling using his Death. As he started that, Ares continued to him while looking back at those versions, "Animals are neither good nor bad. They're just animals. Surviving. Living their lives and dying."

"You get in the way of them living their lives," Zach snarled from two bodies at once, his voice echoing over itself.

"You eat animals without caring how they feel," Ares replied as if it were that simple. "Humans are just one step above those other creatures because of an increased self-awareness and intellect, but they still just live and die and spend their lives surviving and reproducing. It's different for us."

"I'm not like-"

"The way you've gotten stronger is so alike my own ability," Ares countered with a knowing shake of his head as Zach started to shout a denial at him. "You will be immortal like me. Living forever alone."

I'm holding back more in each. Splitting my consciousness better. Control. Power. SPEED! Zach's bodies shot inwards at Ares all at once.

Ares shot up towards the clouds, then dropped as the Zachs changed trajectory and aimed upwards while still leading him to hit together in a single point. Ares dropped between them, then he raced towards the one with the slowest reaction time that was lowest down still. He neared it and his right arm covered in a white aura, but that aura glowed much brighter to the point his brown skin became impossible to see inside it. His whole arm glowed and he swung it towards the dark mass that swung its own arm and fired a black beam at Ares- Ares' white energy slammed through the Death and the body behind it, ripping it apart to shreds in the light.

"Are you learning a lot here?" Ares called out as he spun around and faced the two ten foot tall versions of Zach who were speeding towards him. They each held huge black swords, but they slowed down as Ares pointed palms glowing with white at him while his bodies were still too far back.

He's still much faster. If I "waste" much more he'll realize that I'm not nearly being careful enough. Zach held back instead of rushing haphazardly at the enemy who smirked and lost the glow on those hands as Zach refrained from charging at him. "I'm glad," Ares continued to the teen who heard Ares' tone sounding like he was speaking to a friend. "It's better we meet now, so you don't have to live a full life as a human first before realizing it."

"And what do you think, I'm really going to learn from you?" Zach asked his enemy who his bodies started to move to opposite sides of. "You treat humans like animals. You don't even consider yourself human anymore, which is why you're so alone-"

"I'm alone because people die," Ares countered back, his lips flattening and his eyes getting harsh and cold for a moment. "You don't believe that I was like you once? You don't think it's possible, that we're more alike than anyone-"

"You're a monster," Zach snarled.

"I was once a benevolent God," Ares informed his new friend. "I believed that with my amazing power I should help those around me. Use my ability to make the world a better place! Believe it or not, it's true," Ares snapped with an agitated look flashing over his face for a moment as Zach's dark expressions were unchanging and he felt the teen thought he was lying. Ares called out at one of the two versions he could only look at one at a time because of their positions in the air, "You will lose your faith in humanity as I did. You'll realize how I came to be, and you'll stop trying to help them. I did EVERYTHING I could to make a world that was safer, better, with less war in it. I ruled over Athens, as a beloved king and ruler who cared about his people," Ares shouted at Zach who actually stopped thinking about his own powers and attacking for a moment at the sound of Ares' tone that just shifted in pain and frustration.

"And then I stepped away from leadership and allowed my people to determine how to rule themselves," Ares continued with a shake of his head. "I thought it would be a great idea, this concept I invented… 'Democracy!' Then I spread my culture and its wisdom that I had accumulated through travels across the Greek cities. I spread it all over the world after meeting Aurellio and learning how many people were out there. He already knew what I had yet to accept, and so I spread what they call Hellenistic ideals all over the world in order to progress it! And all the while, people fought wars that made me more and more powerful. Even when I wasn't around. Even as I tried to make peace between neighbors and brokered it between enemies…" Ares' eyes got darker and he rose his head with a disconnected and angry look on his face as he stared into one set of the glowing red eyes looking back at him.

"But men are easily swayed creatures. Driven by power and greed, lust and envy." Ares' voice shook the air around them and made Zach feel like there was a haze in the air as his enemy was getting blurry. The air got hotter around them and the wind speeding through the sky started to swirl in a wide funnel around them so fast that it became visible. Dark clouds pulled down out of the air into the funnel too and lightning cracked to the sides of the men rather than above them as they entered a swirling black tornado. Ares' voice rose as the winds buffeted loudly around them, "I returned to the Greek cities where my children had been regaled as heroes. Demigods who saved cities, and led armies, and fought monsters, and took men on adventure! My grandchildren, whose mothers and fathers oft died out on their adventures, were butchered in their cribs."

Ares' eyes glowed white and his muscles bulged, ripping through the black t-shirt over his upper body and revealing scars underneath. He was facing one of the two ten foot tall Zachs in the sky, letting the one in front of him see the huge diagonal scar cutting from his right shoulder down to the left side of his waist, as well as jagged scars and bumps over his ribs and abs. On his back were scars of lashings, scars Zach recognized far too well from seeing them on the backs of slaves he had freed. He hesitated, staring towards Ares with his red eyes widening for a second as Ares roared out, "The cities that they had saved and which called them heroes, were the same ones who burned their houses down upon word that they had died on the seas or at war. The same people they rescued SLAUGHTERED their children, MY grandchildren, the little- ...In jealousy of their abilities or fear that they would obtain them as my children had."

For a brief moment, Zach stared at this God in understanding. A realization of what could turn Ares-

"It happened every time!" Ares screamed as Zach looked at him like that. He hammered it into the boy watching him whose froze again as the moment was about to pass, as Ares yelled at him, "Unlike the rest of the animals, humans kill their own by the scores. Animals may not be good or evil, but you're wrong. Men are evil. You just haven't lived long enough that you maintain such a naive view of the world.

"Whatever happened to you, way back then," Zach paused and he grit his teeth. "It doesn't matter." Ares narrowed his eyebrows but then relaxed and just smiled anyway which confirmed what Zach already believed. "I know that you have long since stopped believing, but the world is different now."

"Is it?" Ares asked, his voice booming through the tornado that it seemed to bounce off the violently spinning walls of. "You think because it's been a little less violent for the past year than the year before it, that you did something to change the world? There are ups and downs, but human nature does not change! I made peace across my world, across this world more times than you can imagine! Yet every year, as I felt stronger, and every decade, when I came up with new powers, I knew that these people I was trying to help were still just massacring each other! And when I helped them have better and easier lives, they had more children, and populations boomed, and I gained power ever faster as wars were fought between millions instead of thousands. As cities were sacked and the people raped and butchered, and they hated each other so much more… and that made me stronger."

"Who was I to try and stop War when I had fought in so many?" Ares wondered, as if posing the question he had asked himself thousands of years ago when he had finally stopped caring to try. He added, "When I enjoyed it?" That statement posed as a question was directed at the boy in front of him who he smirked at more when saying it. Ares looked at him knowingly and then said to the boy glaring back whose large black fists clenched at his sides, "Maybe that is just the state men love the most. That no matter how wealthy, prosperous, or advanced society gets, men love war. They love to fight, to shed each other's blood, and even when they say they do not, no man ever lives a more fulfilled life than one who dies on the battlefield for what he believes in."

"Is that something you saw often?!" Zach shouted back from both sides of Ares, though his bodies started spinning around him and making Ares turn to track one then dart his gaze to the other from the middle of the tornado. "Because my comrades hated war! My friends died lamenting their deaths and crying and screaming-"

"Is it easier for you now?!" Ares shouted back, as the tornado started constricting around them and making Zach dart his eyes backwards to see the walls closing in. Ares shouted at the teen who glared right back at him as Ares' words pierced through to his core, "If you could kill yourself wouldn't you? I know you want to die! You won't do it though, but you would have gladly given your life on thousands of battlefields! Isn't that right?!" Ares shouted it at the teen who hated how well Ares somehow knew him, as these words echoed in his head and dragged out feelings he had never put words to. "You can't commit suicide, and yet if an enemy had killed you then you would have been satisfied, because dying in battle is the sweetest form of Death! Something I have known for thousands of years has been beyond my reach!"

The tornado collapsed in on itself, and Zach's two bodies exploded backwards into the spinning winds surprising Ares who thought they were about to rush forward at him. Out of the winds that crashed into their creator though, came sharp slices of Death that Ares leaned away from and cut apart with waves of his arms that glowed white around his fingers. More and more slashes of darkness flew out of the winds though, far more than Ares could cut apart and more than he thought could have even been inside those two large bodies of Zach that had been circling him.

Ares flew out of the wind funnel, and a few dozen shards of black wind shot straight out after him. The dark winds spun around while combining and turned into a six foot tall figure coming out of a spinning kick. Ares snapped his body back as a flying slash came off Zach's leg and flew towards him. That slash broke apart into a hail of nails dropping down at the God who shot the other way and then split apart into three bodies himself. Zach's eyes snapped to the right as he thought that was the real form, only for the one in the middle to spin a kick into his left side that sent him flying into the one on the right who connected his fists and pummeled both down on top of Zach's black head that stayed together but squished as Ares pushed down into it and sent his opponent flying out of the air.

The third who Zach had focused on first smacked out his right and left palms down over and over, firing spheres of white light out of the sky down at Zach who spun around with more black wisps flying out of the air and connecting with him. Those wisps created wings on his back that flapped to help him avoid those small spheres that felt much more powerful than their sizes suggested. He shot across the side of a mountain and over the summit, then he raced past a valley that exploded behind him with huge domes of white light exploding every half second just behind his back.

Ares flew through the sky, his bodies reconnecting and then his arms raising up with one larger than usual sphere of light forming over them. Zach sped across the mountain range below him, flying over the mountains that were getting riddled with craters. He turned his head as a light glowed in the corners of his vision, and he ripped two more wings out of his back to speed up even more as Ares sent the attack flying down towards him. Zach hit the side of a mountain, bent his legs, and then dove straight down it and flapped up above into the snow that exploded upwards before melting in midair as the sphere got closer and started expanding before even hitting the ground this time.

Midoriya stumbled to his right and had to leap up in the air as a rockslide started from the cliff above him on his right. He had returned to the area of the ravine to check on where he left the assassins, but when the sky started glowing white and the earthquakes got closer together to the point of being continuous he had to fly up and check what was happening. He looked to the distance north and saw right as that largest sphere of light hit the side of another mountain, and his jaw lowered as the summit of that mountain broke off while an enormous white dome flashed out into the sky. Smoke billowed off the top of the explosion that had flames ripping out of it and a mass of heat condensing it and then bulging up and expanding again in the shape of a mushroom.

All that black smoke mixed with the darkness of the clouds that seemed lower than ever. The sky was not even dropping lightning anymore though, but just filled with static electricity so Midoriya could feel all his hair standing on end as little charges zapped through the air. The being of immense power creating these unnatural phenomena descended on the location of the explosion, and Deku's fists clenched as he knew who was just targeted in that blast.

Zach stood up slowly after getting hit in the back by that blast. He turned around and looked up through the hot black smoke sparking with lightning and rippling with flames. A silhouette moved through the smoke and lowered down ahead of him, dropping with gravity to the ground instead of floating all the way down. He fell to the floor and walked forward on burnt but wet stone. Ares spoke to the boy staring at this enemy who had a backdrop of horror behind him, "I know you better than you know yourself. It's why I don't want you wasting any more time with them. With your foolish goals that you will look back on one day and find so meaningless."

"You don't know anything about me," Zach growled back. "About who I am-"

"I waited for you to come to me, but I have been watching you," Ares countered with a shake of his head at the panting teen boy just fifteen feet in front of him who stood on unsteady legs. "When you killed all those men in the Tusukan Desert, how did it feel?" Ares asked it to the teen who just ground his teeth in anger at something his enemy was reminding him of. What Ares continued with made the pit in his chest turn over though, as Ares continued, "When you found yourself in that place, all alone? All your allies, and all your enemies dead, for the first time. Once you experience that you have finally hit a point of no return."

Zach shook his head, hating the tone of his opponent who sounded to be speaking from memory, from experience. "Where your loneliness can know no bounds…" Ares told a confused but knowing Zach who he could see recognized what he was saying, "In that moment you must have realized it deep inside. That it didn't matter what your ideals were. Nor who your enemies were. Nor how many allies you have or fight with. Your own strength has surpassed them all."

"That's not all that matters," Zach argued back, his voice stronger than his shaky body with black wisps coming off his hands and shoulders looked. "My own strength was important but never the most important thing."

Ares countered in a dark tone, "Your allies were too weak to survive against overwhelming odds. You were the only reason your Army worked. That day you must have known it. When your allies were too weak that they were slaughtered, yet your enemies despite only having to face you afterwards could not stop you, leaving Death the sole survivor." Ares said it and then continued lower to the boy before him, "Death also understood that day, because of the realization of his overwhelming power, that he could not save everyone."

Zach's eyes shot open huge while staring down at the floor. His head stopped shaking in denial and he froze where he was, slowly lifting his eyes up to meet Ares' gaze. "Even on that battlefield against enemies he was able to defeat all on his own, he lost his friends. He could not save them. And if he could not save those two who he cared about so deeply, who were right in front of his eyes, who were strong enough on their own to supposedly have been able to fend for themselves-" Ares voice was rising and rising, but he got quieter as he finished, "Then how could he ever save everyone? How could he save people all over the world if he couldn't even save them? Death can't. Death, you can't."

Ares said that in a soft voice and shook his head at the teenager staring back at him through dimly glowing and wide red eyes. "Your whole quest and purpose was foolish. Flawed. There was an extent to which you could fight, but you could never do it in its entirety as you wanted. You could never stop all villains. It's not a naive goal, it's just an impossible and stupid one." Ares' eyes narrowed and his voice got lower as Zach just glared back at him for saying that. Zach's legs stood firmer and his body loosened up, and Ares growled at the boy acting like that in front of him, "Naive implies some kind of foolish ignorance that allows an innocent person to believe something far-fetched, implausible, but you chose that goal knowing how impossible it was! You only convinced yourself you could do it because you know that when you believe in things the most you try your hardest to complete them."

"Shut up." Zach's voice came out low and menacing. His body no longer appeared damaged at all. Nothing had changed with it, but the way he was standing just made him look perfectly fine rather than nearly collapsing.

Ares did not falter though, just glaring at his opponent who looked to get a second wind, "You must have realized the stupidity of it all then, when you changed your goals, when you decided to just be a God like I once decided…"

"I never decided that. I know that I am not-"

"I know everything that happened that day!" Ares yelled at the younger man trying to deny it. Zach froze and he tilted his head back, his face scrunching up as Ares snapped at him, "Don't try to convince me otherwise, because I know you didn't kill them all!"

Zach clenched his eyes shut for a second. Hiding nearby in the smoke, Midoriya was already holding his breath but he found his heart racing as he thought he already knew everything about this day from what Zach had told him. Ares continued in a low but loud voice, "When you were in the middle of killing them all in that sandstorm. As you dyed the desert red with their blood, you spared some of them! You gave them mercy. Why?"

"I was-"

"You wanted them to spread the fear of you, sure," Ares called at the teenager before he could explain himself. "Even in that crazed state, you chose to let some of them go free so that they could tell others what would happen should they try to ambush you again. Should they kill more of your comrades. And by doing this, you must have felt somewhere inside that it would save some of your comrades in the future. That that action would help you, no matter how insane it was!" Zach shook his head, but Ares snapped at him, "I've felt what it is to be God for so long, but I can only imagine what it was like for you there. Killing hundreds, and then letting a handful go. Right in the middle of it all, as they all screamed while you ripped them apart…" Zach's eyes clenched shut harder, and Ares continued louder at him, "I heard from one of the survivors that you separated four of them, told them to flee while your hundred arms whipped around the sandstorm. And then as they started to run, you grabbed one of them and dragged him back in! Why? Tell me! Why did you do it?!"

Zach stopped shaking his head, a disturbed look flashing over his face as he remembered in that blurry memory doing exactly what Ares was yelling at him. "Do you even know why?! Did he give you a funny look?! That's what the man I spoke to couldn't handle more than anything else! That you seemed to do it at random. Like you just decided for no reason other than a whim that you were going to kill one of those you had just shown mercy to! Like sparing four was sparing one too many, and you just randomly picked that one! Was that it?!"

"I DON'T KNOW!" Zach screamed, snapping his head up and roaring in rage, a massive flare of Death ripping out of his back and going for fifty meters behind and above him. Ares' eyes darted up and his mouth snapped shut at how huge that flare of darkness was. It continued to flare out of him like that, only now it started twisting around and getting wider out to the left and right sides. Zach was panting, but he slowed down his breathing and glared at Ares with a newfound rage unlike anything he had ever felt before, because all of his self-hatred and loathing was directed towards Ares along with his hate towards Ares himself. "Did you think I was getting weaker?" Zach snarled.

Zach cocked his head to the right then tilted it back as he rolled his neck in an insane way. He smirked violently and leaned backwards with his arms bubbling in Death. His skin ripped apart to replace with Death. His scars lined with it and webs raced up his neck and around the back of his head. Zach's hair waved over his skull and grew ten times longer, looking long and straight as it waved around twice as tall as Zach's own body. "Did you think I was running out of Death?" Zach asked, as the amount of Death behind him kept growing and pulsing out and ripping around the sky at his back. "The fifth version of myself your earlier attack ripped through had barely any Death in it compared to the others, a decoy I wanted you to destroy. You think me showing you less Death was a sign that I had less and less to use?"

Ares stayed quiet though his eyes did shift around examining the enormous mass of Death behind Zach and the boy's own transforming body. "You see, Ares, I haven't used Limiter 0 since the Battle of the 6 Armies. I couldn't control it then and I still used Trigger a couple times that day. I needed to, because I couldn't control it all but I needed more than ever to face Zombieman and all those thousands of villains. Yet, I killed many people that day and in the months following. I never used my full power at once on that battlefield because I couldn't control it even without the Trigger, and now I'm even more powerful."

A constant wave shot out of Zach's back from the back of his skull down to his ankles. Death just poured out of him like a faucet on full blast that made the ground shake below him and start turning blacker like the sky all around.

Midoriya backed up, and he jumped away fast as he stared at Zach's huge growing body. He wasn't in trouble. He, was luring Ares in. He was pretending. Like against Kaminari in the forest that day. Midoriya gulped as he stared towards the God of War and his own friend who he just heard had done some absolutely mad things back in time. "I DON'T KNOW!" Ares is getting to him. He's drawing out the worst in Zach… Zach still has so much power though, and he can't fight at full with me in the vicinity. Even though he's claiming that stuff like he has control over that much Death now, if I'm in the area a single missed blow could-

Ares rose up his right foot. Zach's red eyes darted down to it, then he shot backwards into his own two hundred foot tall wall of Death that had formed behind him. The ground where he had just been standing blasted upwards as Ares stomped into the ground and split it. Light shot up through the crack that cut past where Zach just was all the way underneath his black wall. The light that shone up was not nearly enough though for the wall that crashed over itself and just revealed an even wider and thicker mass of Death behind it.

Ares floated off the ground again and stared ahead as he rose up the wall of wisping Death. Past it he could see the waves of Death that moved less violently than earlier. They moved in more specific patterns. Controlled, Ares realized as he saw Death swirling in different directions towards single points all over the surface of the strange mass of Death Zach had created. It was not just crashing one way or the other, nor was it random despite the hundreds of movements seeming random to the untrained eye. He's been gradually getting smaller and looking to have less Death while really just condensing so much more of it inside smaller and fewer bodies.

"I learned control in smaller and fewer forms, just to get a hang of it. To have those options available in a prolonged fight." The middle of Zach's wide body rose up, while four corners of it speared into the sky and shaped like towers. The center section that rose appeared like a long thick torso except there was no neck before the head portion that had the two huge red eyes on it each larger than Ares was tall. Those tall thin eyes glared down at the God whose body erupted in a brighter and larger aura of his own white energy than he had around him before. The red of Zach's tall eyes swirled around like a liquid among the gaseous darkness, but even the darkness flowed more like liquid than it should considering it had no containing walls. Yet it had tendrils that ripped off the top of it and seeped into the air as if strands of pitch black smoke.

Hundreds of pitch black tendrils seeped off of the massive dark structure that in no way seemed to have shrunk since Zach's release of Limiter 0. "GOOD!" Ares shouted as those tendrils did not fade away but instead started to narrow and take shape as hundreds of little black needles hovering over the waving black fortress. "It's about time I get serious as well!" The sky around Ares seemed to shake, the atmospheric pressure around him changing so that Midoriya could see from a distance their enemy get blurry without that God moving an inch. The air around him just became so thick that it became harder to see that man whose blurry face still showed a mouth opening as he roared out, "For this first, of many clashes between the God of War and the God of DEATH!"

You are not the only one who's been waiting for this. Out of Zach's upper body that was twenty feet wide, twenty five feet thick, and over a hundred tall, four arms ripped out of his sides. The two arms on either side were not directly above one another, instead just ripping out at different elevations and at different points on his huge pillar-like body. Zach waved the bottom left-ish of his hands forward, and the storm of black needles shot off from the top of the waving surface of Death under the upper pillar body. As much as I've wanted a fight like this though, I despise you with every fiber of my being. "GRRRRrrrrr…" Zach's voice came out shaking the already fuzzy static air ahead of him, darkening it more even as the clouds dropped from above them.

Ares' aura exploded around him and shattered the hundreds of thin black needles flying his way. As they ripped apart however, they were overcome by the thicker streams of darkness that all shot up from the massive fortress of Death Zach had created. Those thick jets of Death got wider as they pulled back in the tendrils that had seeped off before, and just by flaring his energy Ares could not destroy these thicker beams of Death. He shot between three of them though, then his body twisted and flew around the lower of Zach's right arms that shot towards him faster than the rest of the Death appendages were moving.

As two upper black arms slammed down towards Ares, and the God of War slammed his right hand forward while dodging to fire a beam of blue light through Zach's midsection, a dark figure flew out from that midsection. Zach flew directly underneath the bright blue beam that burned hotter than the white energy from before. He shot out of his own huge body with his red eyes high above losing some of their glow, but not all of it even as that smaller body gained a red glow on its head-section. Zach shot out when the beam was colliding thus hiding beneath it as it was fired at Ares' mid-level. The God seemed to sense the attack coming from below was more of a threat than the two huge arms still swinging down at him that he had planned on dodging.

Ares dropped down himself and reached his right hand forward, swiping it an instant before the blade of black that pierced out of Zach's extended right arm could connect. Zach continued flying behind the blade as it pushed into a forcefield in front of Ares' hand. Even when the force from Ares' swipe was finished and he continued pushing the black blade out into the God to try and hit his hand, Ares continued to force it away without the darkness even touching him. Then he moved his right hand, and he let the black blade pass by his side as Zach's full force pushing forward slammed the weapon past the turning God. Ares allowed Zach to pass right in front of his body, then he shot towards the middle of Zach's much larger form that had a huge hole in it now.

Ares stopped inside that body right as all the darkness started pulling in on his sides to refill what the beam had blown away. He rose up his hands though, creating a bright white light that started turning light-blue after a moment of charging it. Zach spun and flew back while two other normal-sized versions of himself leaned out of the darkness approaching Ares from all sides. They snapped out of the Death as if Zach was hiding below the surface and jumped out with blades formed in his right hands, or his right arms just making the shape of blades themselves as they were created. All three slashed at Ares, but he slammed down his hands and fired an even wider beam than a few seconds ago. He blasted it through the bottom of Zach's protruding massive body and made the top half rip off, while the whole bottom of Zach's enormous castle-like form had a hole blown through the center of it.

The towers on the corners of the fortress crumbled and pulled inwards towards a whirlpool of Death that was flooding into the middle hole where Ares had just blasted away all the darkness. The ground below the Death mass exploded but Ares had to fly high up as all the Death pulled down right above that hole where he was floating. Despite how large his attack was, and the fact that the landscape around them broke apart and quaked from the collision of his beam with the floor, it did nothing to disperse all the Death that immediately yanked back inwards against the force of the explosion pushing out and upwards.

Zach allowed more of his body to get blown upwards with the force of the blast when that was where Ares started flying to. As Ares started dodging the huge swipes of Death coming out of the bulges from Zach's fast-moving and giant body though, he suddenly had to dodge much more as massive chunks of stone shot up out the top of Zach's Death. Even when he swiped his hands towards them and blew away the Death shrouding the rocks, his attacks shattered the stones rather than destroy them completely. Then waves of Death flew up and surrounded all the debris, before dropping it below and then slinging it back up in hails of debris streaming trails of Death in every direction.

Ares threw his right hand up as this enormous mass of Death chased him into the clouds. A ball of white light flew off his right palm and into the clouds that dispersed from the force of the explosion. And then it rained. It rained down white light in sharp long pieces that widened as they collided with Death. And then all of Zach's huge body sucked in towards one point, towards the one figure of Zach's normal size who shot out of the Death as it pulled like a hurricane-force wind back into a single body.

White and black shards of energy dropped out of the sky in all directions, and Midoriya had to flee backwards even farther as every piece was too dangerous to let touch him. Even the smaller strands of white light that missed all the Death after Zach pulled his body together, seared deep holes through solid stone that barely seemed to slow the energy down at all. And Zach's Death, Midoriya was not going to let even the tiniest piece touch him and risk knocking him out in the midst of this. Yet not being able to touch any of that made it impossible to get within a half mile radius of the two now. They were getting harder to avoid though as their fight suddenly shot all over the sky with no limit to the expanse their battle would stretch.

It was all Midoriya could do to follow the explosions of white pushing against black that went off all across the sky. A dozen sphere-shaped eruptions or domes of light took place just over the ground or even just underneath it in some instances. In those instances where they clashed under the surface after dropping there with the ground breaking apart around them to make room, the collisions they made sent the debris flying up into the sky in all directions of the crater. Then more flew out from the double-crater that was created each time since they flew off from those spots with another explosion of force.

Midoriya spun to the left and watched as Zach's four arms swung inwards towards where Ares was ducking and kneeing up at the same time with a bright white light bursting from his kneecap. Then Deku had to spin to his right and cross his arms to block the force of the hit much closer to him but higher up in the air so all the clouds around it pushed up high. Clouds swirled in a circle around the point they were just torn away from the moment Zach and Ares shot back down into the ground, breaking it apart down the slope of the mountain Midoriya tried to stay standing on. He had to jump up as the ground under his feet cracked though, but at least it was better than the ground down in the valley that all rose up while Zach and Ares dropped down on a single descending chunk. All the rest of the cracked pieces of valley rose up on cubes and rectangular prisms of stone and dirt and breaking tree roots.

Ares shot towards his enemy as they were sinking and Zach still was crouched on the piece they landed on. The God's head snapped to the side though and he yanked his body away but not fast enough. The long arm that stretched behind Zach and around the side of the chunk they descended on came out of Ares' blindspot and grabbed him by the right ankle. It whipped the God of War around and then threw him under the heaviest of the lifted pieces of earth that was already dropping down because it had not risen as much as the other chunks around it. Zach threw Ares straight through one block of stone and then another chunk of earth as he did not get Ares fully under that huge one.

Ares slammed his arms out to the side and let out a scream, "HAAAA!" A white pillar ripped out of the surface and high into the sky, protecting the man inside it who shot up his own energy and watched as dozens of black tendrils broke apart and shredded in the outer wall of his light in attempts to reach in and pull him out. As one of those black tendrils was breaking apart though, a body with much less Death on it came flying through that darkness with the last of his black veil shredding and then his skin underneath too. Zach's smirk covered from ear to ear though as he reached both hands forward, only for Ares to pull his head back in the energy and avoid as Zach tried to clap his temples. Zach continued to push through the beam even after his arms swung and missed though, and he slammed his searing head over his crossing arms.

Zach smashed his forehead into Ares' in the middle of the beam and knocked his enemy out of it. Then an eruption of Death blew out of his back and did not get ripped apart as the beam was losing energy without Ares inside it anymore. Blood had broken from the skin of Zach's forehead when he smashed it into Ares' face, but there was a mark on Ares' forehead as well. The older of the two laughed though while punching his left fist forward. Zach spun with the wings that came out of his explosion and spiraled him around Ares' fist- only for Ares' right leg to hit him in the right side of his ribs. CRACK!

Zach lifted his left hand covered in darkness and fired an energy blast of blue out of it, straight into Ares' face and eyes that were nowhere near as bloodshot as Zach's were around his glowing red irises. He had been glaring at Ares nonstop even inside that high pillar of energy, and his eyes burned as much as his ribs screamed in pain. Zach fired blue light out of his dented left arm though into Ares' face and made the God reel backwards, then he snapped that left arm through the smoke and gripped it on Ares' cheeks.

Ares ducked his head down, which pulled Zach's left arm down and away from the left side of his own face that Ares' left fist just came flying at. Zach covered the left side of his face in a much thicker veil of Death that made his skull impossible to see inside, and Ares' bare fist about to hit it pulled back for a second, then opened up into a palm from which a force knocked back the spear of Death shooting out of Zach's face. The force that Ares just fired out of his own hand without even using energy or a swing of his fist still sent Zach flipping backwards through the air over ten times before he was able to spin around and flap huge wings behind him.

When Zach stopped himself in the air he saw Ares with his right arm finishing a downwards swipe in front of him. A thick bolt of lightning dropped out of the sky that Zach saw flash in the top of his vision and made him start pulling away. He only got his body half out of the way though, and the lightning cut through his right side and electrocuted the teenage boy who let out a deep bellowing roar that echoed across the mountains. Two more bolts of lightning dropped down and hit him as he was screaming. MOVE! As much extra pain as that put him in, floating there unmoving in the shock was only going to get him hurt more. So even as he roared out in pain again, he flapped his wings behind him that were not electrocuted like much of his currently paralyzed body.

His eyes flared with red as he shot across the air and moved his limp limbs using only the Death he surrounded them in. He covered them in so much thick Death that he removed the actual limbs from inside and just controlled his Death arms and legs as if he was controlling his own limbs, but with full mobility manually using his mind rather than the movements he had known instinctively since he was a child. He flew at Ares full speed and kicked and punched all his limbs at once. Ares crossed his arms then uncrossed them, and since Zach's limbs were not actually formed enough to be solid they just tore into pieces and shot in all directions from the force of Ares uncrossing his arms outwards.

"Even if you have more and more Death inside you," Ares called at the boy who was pushed backwards while his arms and legs were torn apart by the shockwave rippling through the sky. "I'll shred it all piece by piece until you have no strength left!"

"Then you better be ready for a very long night," Zach snarled. His arms and legs reemerged out of his body and his dark voice carried through the sky as the air around him darkened. "I have far more than you know left to give," Zach's growl echoed through the night sky, and the air around him dropped two notches darker while Zach brought both his right and left hands to the right side of his waist. A hilt snapped out of his curled hands in an instant, stopping a couple centimeters over his fists at the guard of the weapon that bubbled and condensed before piercing out into an fifty meter long blade. The weapon expanded that long in a second, flashing the sky to Zach's right side in darkness.

Lightning cracked out of the clouds, and it got pushed back by the raging cloud of Death swirling around Zach. The air seemed thinner around him, as if all the oxygen was getting ripped out of it. Ares lowered down his smile for a moment as the blade Zach had extended out across the sky to his right just thickened more with all the darkness around Zach's body seeming to flood into the weapon. His form itself stayed black but with his bones becoming visible inside again, and Ares could even admire some of his own work as the cracks in Zach's ribs were visible to him now. His eyes were drawn to the blade though and the Death that swirled around the weapon's thin blade like a double-helix getting more violent each second with how fast it was spinning around.

Zach released a breath that hung in the air in front of him. The entire landscape around him was eerily quiet in the moment. The clouds had stopped rumbling. Ares was not shouting and neither was he. Midoriya found himself holding his breath as he watched from far down below and three quarters of a mile away as he was barely keeping up with the other two. Ares' eyes snapped open wider as the spinning helixes around Zach's huge black weapon suddenly flattened to the blade and tripled it in size. Zach's arms bulged as if with muscles only made completely of Death that gave him the strength and speed to swing his huge weapon across the front of his body in a slash that moved so fast yet barely left a trail of darkness in its wake as Zach condensed everything into the weapon he had charged and thickened with his immense power.

Ares' widened eyes darted to the left, and his arms that were raising just slammed down hard. He was flying up anyway, but he fired out a pair of white beams from his palms and shot up even faster to dodge the blade that extended while slashing across the sky at him. The weapon itself seemed to be alive, pulling towards him so fast and with barely any warning other than the swirling Death around the weapon pulling into it in the second Zach swung.

The God of War was too fast though. His body leaned backwards while pushing up, so even though the beams of white below him got cut straight through by the much larger black blade slicing through the sky, Ares just felt the wind from it passing below his back. Zach bit down furiously as Ares dodged rather than try to take the attack or block which he was hoping his enemy would do, underestimating just how much Death he had put specifically in the section of the blade that was aligned with where Ares had been in the sky compared to the rest of the sword. All of that Death pulsed out into the rest of the weapon as it passed below Ares though, as it was meant to explode on and around the God but Zach no longer wanted it all wasted.

As Ares finished his dodge with a grin formed on his face but an intense look in his eyes, and Zach focused on controlling all that Death and not wasting his failed attack, Midoriya's jaw stayed dropped as he stared past Ares at the damage Zach caused. The collateral of Zach's missed attack was so destructive Midoriya was worried some of the huge chunks of mountain trailing with Death wisps would be a danger to people, though he had to remind himself that there was absolutely no one around in any direction. That fact had led to earlier confusion and dread but only made him feel relief now. Zach's black blade had cut across the surface of a mountain much higher up than where Midoriya was standing down on a rock surface, up on a slope that had a lot of snow on it still on either side above and below where Zach's blade had cut through.

Zach's blade had left a huge black mark ripped through the mountain's snow cover and the stone surface up near the summit where the blade finally passed across and cut some very large chunks off the mountain, one of the ten tallest in the whole range by Midoriya's estimate. Ares was floating only a few hundred feet in front of that mountain, and the enemy and secret leader of the assassins chuckled in a way so unsettling to Zach as the dark boy glowered back at his enemy. As giant chunks of rock fell out of the air off to Zach's left, he floated backwards through the air and tried to hide the fact that he was panting from his enemy. Ares could see the darkness move in and back out in front of his face though.

"What an attack," Ares started, having seen what the slash did as he backflipped in the air during his dodge. He had watched as it cut across and dragged a trench through the mountain behind him, and now he floated in midair staring towards an enemy who could do such a thing and who still had more left in him. The look on his face was more intense than Zach had seen it yet. And that made his heart pound faster and faster in his chest until he made that heart disappear due to the fear he was feeling in this moment.

Ares' right hand snapped up at his right side. He held it out with his palm open, and Midoriya spun his head and looked up as he heard a whirring sound flying through the air. Deku spun back around and watched as the spinning sword flew straight towards Ares' right hand. The hilt slammed into his palm with a deafening crack that filled the sky as a flash of lightning illuminated Ares' face and the deadly smirk that was there. Zach stared into the eyes of a man who had killed more people than anyone he had ever fought before. His eyes shot to the blade that Ares gripped the hilt of in such a strong way, his right hand turning the weapon and pointing the blade out to his right side as he repositioned in midair.

The air all around Ares changed color. The entire atmosphere from Ares' body out to the slashed mountain behind him and to the ground a half mile below turned a dark shade of blue. It was as if a filter fell over the world, and then all the sky pulled back in towards Ares with a brighter shade of green filling the atmosphere so even the lightning crashing out of the rumbling dark clouds was shaded green in the eyes of Zach and Midoriya who found the air around them changing tint as well. Unlike when Zach held his massive blade, the regular-sized sword Ares held in his right hand seemed to make the sky and the ground tremble. Ares took in a breath and let it out the same as Zach did before… The same exact exhale.

Zach's red eyes bulged and his body started stretching, as there was no time for anything else. His whole human form vanished inside the spread of Death that he sent skyrocketing up while screaming and looking down where he thought Midoriya might be, "WATCH OUT WATCH OUT WATCH OUT-"

Ares slashed across the front of his body. Zach's red eyes tried to follow the God's lagging body, his form never seeming to move in a smooth way but just appearing in three or four different positions as his blade appeared in different spots ahead of him and then onto his left side. The slash was straighter than Zach had cut with a more diagonal movement up the slope of the mountain behind Ares in the end.

The blade itself never touched Zach. He still felt his body sliced in half down below where he only had Death on him. Getting fully cut in half was not so shocking. The fact that as he had turned partly to the side already so now he was turning even more but diagonally was not much of a shocker. The problem was that the entire world was tilting down below him, and yet the largest mountain in the range that was back behind him farther than another of the mountains was behind Ares, was not tilting with the rest of the world. Zach's eyes dragged down from that summit that seemed level with his eyes for too long despite his head and upper body turning to the side.

The mountain had been split completely. There was no trench slashed in the surface, as Ares' slash did not stop with stone. That power… Zach could not finish the thought he was having in too much shock as millions of tons of stone rose up into the air from the force of the split with the rest of the mountain below it. And then his moment of shock passed, and Zach's upper body and lower body shot backwards away from Ares while flooding tone of Death towards his right arm that extended a hundred times and then expanded a hundred times more than that at his right hand.

Zach reached underneath the summit of the rising tilting mountain. Deku's jaw that could not drop lower after turning and seeing what Ares had done, hurt because it was already at its lowest point possible yet he found himself in more shock as Zach wrapped up the base of the summit as it was reaching the top of whatever arc it was making. The huge black hand with dozens and then hundreds of black tendrils wrapping underneath the bottom and up over the sides pulled towards Zach who swung his right arm forward.

Ares laughed with his voice bellowing through the sky. He shot forward as Zach threw the mountain at him, and he slashed his sword up and then across his front to the right side. The mountaintop split again with a plus-shaped cut dividing it into four even chunks, and Zach came flying through the split with his body reconnecting as Ares had cut him right through the mountain that Zach was chasing the back of immediately after throwing. Ares swung his left hand forward and fired a beam of light-blue energy towards Zach who dropped below it and then allowed himself to get cut vertically only to start reconnecting as if that was his plan the whole time. Meanwhile, Zach's stronger body dropped above the split in the top two mountain quarters Ares was flying through and that Zach had hidden behind while another version of himself with red eyes had flown straight at the God of War.

Zach dropped down on Ares with both of his feet extended and Death amassing there. He went through his enemy's body that faded above him. Ares' real form appeared past the after-images and the backs of all four pieces of the mountain he had split and that Zach had flown through to intercept him. He kicked his right leg across the front of his body and dissipated the two thick black tendrils that had formed from Zach's splitting body below that he never really had fully focused on. Zach flew through the dissipating Death though stronger than that single force of kick could destroy, yet Ares had both hands behind his back with his wrists together. Zach darted his eyes up as he saw the sword was not in Ares' hands, giving him both to charge a dozen huge white spheres all pushing into each other behind his back and getting more condensed.

Zach's body tore apart into five different forms with a dozen black tendrils ripping off them around Ares back and pulling towards it. If he can't attack fully forward- Ares swung his arms forward and brought ten of the spheres of white light with him, sending two off behind his back in seemingly random movements that cut apart Zach's attacking black tendrils. The other ten chased after Zach's black bodies that flew off with black wings behind them, but Ares could control the movements of these attacks and he had them chasing the Zachs all across the sky.

Two seconds after the spheres started chasing Zach, two of Zach's bodies flew towards each other and then straight up at the last second as they merged. Another two swept down near dropping pieces of the mountain that had yet to touch down unlike the lower two that were causing massive earthquakes all over the Muindo Range. As three spheres of light erupted in a midair blast after colliding too quickly with each other, another five slammed into shards of mountain and blew away the versions of Zach that had led them there. Those Zach bodies were torn back from their forms into just winds of black Death that swept into the sky and then spun around from the force of the explosions down below them.

The final Zach fired beams of black at the energy spheres flying at him, pushing them away and then curving them into each other using his own power as he fought against Ares' control. His eyes were torn from the explosion he made to the one down closer to the surface level though, as the five spheres exploding at once had created one enormous and compiling explosion that tore apart most of the tallest of the Muindo's summits as soon as it had touched the ground. Zach only looked towards the explosion for a second, when he caught Ares doing a flip in the corner of his vision still right where the God had been when he sent all those attacks flying that made him scatter across the expansive battlefield.

What is- Zach saw a glint from the light of one of the explosions reflect off something flying at him, but there was no way to dodge the sword that Ares kicked the bottom of the hilt of from over three hundred meters away. The blade pierced through him and tore off his right arm, and Zach screamed as he did not know how much of that had been darkness as he was too scattered around at the moment. Black wind flooded through the sky back towards him though, and another version of himself flew up between him and the opponent who had to have heard that agonized roar.

Ares was too fast for just one piece of Zach to block though. That version spun and shot back towards the one who had screamed, even letting off an explosion of Death behind it as Zach tried to pull it towards his largest collection of Death before Ares reached him. There was no chance of that though. Ares stopped in front of Zach who crossed his left arm in front of him, a recreating right arm emerging as well with a blade ready for a counterattack-

The Ares that appeared in front of Zach with his fist swinging forward just faded as it slammed into him. Another after-image, Zach realized, but he rose his eyes too slowly to the God who was right above him with his body parallel to the ground down below. His fists were pointed down towards the top of Zach's head, and Ares stared into Zach's red eyes with his arms extended and his fists only a couple centimeters apart and just a few inches away from Zach's face. "#&*$%"

Whatever language Ares spoke had long been lost to time. Zach did not know it. He could barely understand the sound Ares made to be a word, let alone making any of the sounds he had heard before and could put letters to. The name of the attack did not matter though, as Zach coughed up blood from lungs he did not even think he had at the moment. He fell from the sky faster than an anchor, creating a hole in the smoke of the explosions down below and then through the water too so deep he actually had a moment to breathe in after coughing up like that. After breathing in while inside an air pocket, the water collapsed back in on the forming lake at the bottom of the enormous new crater.

Where am I? Zach was spinning around in the swirling whirlpool that collapsed in after he had dropped with such force to open a hole in the lake. The water was already rushing hard though because it was flooding in from underground aquifers no one had tapped in centuries, and it washed even more water through the whirlpool as the lake increased in volume. Zach stopped spinning around as much, though he had to swim his way to an upright position as the water was moving too hard for him to get a solid underwater grasp on Death. The whole landscape is changing to our fight. Zach held his breath and he moved his left hand down to his stomach and right above where his insides were more damaged.

Nerve damage in the prosthetic, Zach could only feel three of his fingers, which he almost did not notice as the pain of the touch on his torso overpowered the rest of his sense of touch for a second. Right arm? Zach glanced down through the water that was almost pitch black, and he curled two of his fingers on his left hand in a way to make a low blue glow underwater giving him a view of the gash and all the blood coming out of his right side. There was still darkness all around his right shoulder and the arm, but he tried to force more away and would have let out a sigh of relief at the sight of skin underneath if not for the fact he was still underwater. Can't breathe. Think faster. There has to be a weakness- not one he wouldn't have worked out the kinks of in thousands of years.

Midoriya's at risk up there. The world is breaking. How far are the quakes affecting? It doesn't matter. We have to stay here or-

The water around Zach started pushing to the sides, and he grit his teeth while glaring up at the glowing white light coming down towards him. Not a beam, Zach saw a figure inside the energy that was so strong it was pushing apart the waves. He forced out Death below his feet. The water level pushed away from him and wings ripped out of his drenched back. He flapped them down and flew straight up through the white aura towards his smirking enemy who opened his mouth as Zach reemerged from the new sea in the deep valley. Zach flew up between pillar islands of rocks from the broken mountains around them, and smoke chased up after him as it was pulled back in by the force of how fast he rose up towards Ares.

Zach spiraled and swung his right arm, but his body twisted and his left leg came spinning around his back, only to miss the side of Ares' face as the God pulled his head back. Zach finished swinging his right hand and punched a single fist of black out away from him to make it disappear in the smoke that rose past the two, while he kicked a slash of darkness off his foot as it passed in front of Ares' face. Ares blew out his pursed lips and made the slash flying at him push back away. Then he ducked down and kicked upwards with a white aura surrounding his right leg and strengthening right before it hit Zach in the gut barely covered by Death.

Zach could feel the foot on his spine through his stomach, though luckily he turned most of his vital organs into Death to avoid a fatal blow. The force of the kick still shot out of his back where Ares' foot was visible, blowing a huge wing up into the sky and taking the rest of the dust and smoke up with it. The force was so strong it nearly pulled a funnel of water up from the lake down below them as it took all the air between them and the lake's surface away.

Then Ares spun and he slashed his right hand behind him with a white veil over it that cut through the black fist flying at him through open sky now with no cover to hide behind. Zach knew there was no point in trying for a sneak attack without the cover, but he watched Ares' right hand closely as the supposed God of War cut through it and then swung his arm back around towards the boy he pointed his palm at. Zach opened his chest up with a wide hole that only bled Death on the insides of his shoulders, under his collarbone, and above his stomach. The force that erupted out of Ares' palm expanded almost immediately, but he was so close to Zach at that moment that it only grew in strength halfway through his body and ripped some Death out of Zach's back from the open hole in him.

Ares pulled his arm backwards as Zach reached his bloody right hand in towards it, then his left hand that lifted over the crossing right flashed bright with blue into Ares' eyes. No actual attack came out of the fake hand, but Zach grinned while snapping his wings forward on his sides and sending himself flying back through the air. He was panting but seething his breaths through his nose rather than out his mouth. Gather strength. Keep it together. Can't waste any more. But… Zach's mouth flattened as the wings he had snapped forward on his sides pulled back. After flapping them forward the tips of his wings had covered the front of his body for a moment, but Ares smirked at the sight of his opponent's face that could not hide everything he was feeling.

"This is what I wanted, Death God," Ares said. He seemed to relax for a moment, before his grin turned more deadly once again and his expression as serious as could be. Yet even looking like he was getting back into the fighting mood, he called out at his opponent floating twenty-five feet ahead of him, "You and me, together at last. For the first fight of many."

"This will be the first and the last," Zach growled back in reply.

His voice was angry and devoid of the excitement that Ares was feeling and displaying, but Ares just grinned more and tsk-tsked at his opponent who glared more furiously back at him. "Don't pretend you aren't enjoying this. I know you, Zach!" Ares called out, sounding close to laughing like what he shouted was obvious to him and should be to Zach too. "You really think Deku could ever fight you like this? He can barely track the two of us, too focused down there on protecting those pathetic monsters you came here to destroy-"

"They're your fucking assassins!" Zach yelled back in rage at his enemy. "And I am nothing like you! I hate you!" Zach screamed that, his fists shaking at the idea of them being similar to each other. Ares' expression did not shift though, it only got more assured and like he was closer to laughing at Zach's denials. "You have started countless wars! How many?!"

"Hundreds."

"HUNDREDS!" Zach repeated in a roar of fury. "Hundreds?!" He repeated, his voice cracking as he called it out, his head tilting back with his eyebrows curling up in an emotion he had not felt in a long time.

"Don't act so horrified," Ares started, though he did lower his smile a bit and then sigh as he stared at his opponent whose expression was real. "I understand how you feel. I do. But you and I are the only ones who will come to matter to you, someday." Zach shook his head while staring down this insane figure who just continued speaking in a knowing voice, "All those who died in the wars that made me strong, their lives mean nothing to me. Not anymore. Not after this long." Ares looked down on Zach from equal level and he informed his new companion, "I believe you will be with me longer than even Aurellio. He lived the longest of the three. Eziano aged faster than Enzo did, and none of his sons had ever inherited Longevity."

"None of them are alive anymore either," Ares added, raising his tone and glancing up into the air for a moment. "He had more children than just the two you killed in the Pit, and yet you killed more of his sons than just the two that day." Zach stared at Ares with his eyes widening a little more for a second, and the God of War glanced down and finished while looking into Zach's eyes, "Even if you had the Saudis execute Enzo instead of doing it yourself."

Zach's breath hitched. Enzo Kiribachi! Only in that moment did he remember that he had heard Eziano's father's name before. He had not made the connection between him and the escaped prisoner from Tartaros though. Ares continued to the teenager in front of him staring back in shock, "Eziano abandoned that son in order to turn him into Mongoloid. Through the time he would spend in prison, influenced inside by agents of Fergus and King who were loyal to neither. They whispered in his ear, what they believed were their ideas because of the whispers in their own ears."

He's… he's been everywhere. The whole time it's been-

"I was searching for an immortal for so long," Ares continued, his voice cutting through the air between him and Zach. Everything else was silent between them with only their words filling the space. "And when I found Fergus I knew there was a possibility. I wanted to see if he could become the man to stay with me through time. I whispered to him in his youth. The idea for his first lab… in Virginia." Ares watched as Zach's face distorted and then froze like the rest of his body. "Fergus started there and became rich from the discoveries he made in that lab. That allowed him to build more such facilities all over the world, and grow stronger and create the Fourth Eye. Yet, as much as I had hoped he would be immortal," Ares lips curled down at the corners into a disappointed and detached frown. "Fergus was cruel and greedy, selfish-"

"I can't-" Zach started but stopped himself. He froze with his mouth open, and Ares looked at him confusedly. Zach shook his head once but had to stop again. His face scrunched up, "You- I've never, despised anyone more in my life than you in this moment." Zach said it as he was realizing it himself. The look of disgust could not even fully form on his face because he was still in too much shock from that realization and what he was trying to comprehend in his head.

"His search for immortality bored me," Ares said in a deeper voice while staring deep into Zach's eyes again. There was a despairing hint in his eyes, as the tone Zach just had while saying that suggested the hatred he felt would not die down easily. "You do not need to search for it though, and rather I feel more connected to you because you don't want it. Unlike Fergus who grew old and desperate, you yearn for that which you can never have."

"Are you always responsible for war?" Zach and Ares were having different conversations. The two of them saw the other differently than the other saw them. Zach could see what Ares thought he was and what he would become one day, while Ares had to admit to himself that he understood his opponent's feelings in the moment. "Men like Fergus and Eziano… The Shadow Bosses and Fourth Eye- even Mongoloid. The shadowy forces that push the world's greed and violence and evil!"

"That is just the nature of men," Ares countered. His tone was knowing and his voice low as if he was speaking down to a naive child.

"I know that's not true," Zach countered back though.

"You don't know anything yet," Ares replied, lifting up the corners of his lips once more at the implication in his words that Zach would come to understand him. The aura around Ares flared so huge that the sky around them brightened with white light. The top of it rippled like a raging inferno, pushing against the black aura that erupted out of Zach's body in that moment. Zach leaned his head forward and rose his arms up at his sides. His aura pushed inwards, into Ares' that pushed right back at him. Zach's body raged with the Death around him but it did not surround his core body in the center of the aura, while Ares had a separate thin veneer of a pure white inside the more translucent veil that kept his body nearly impossible to make out inside.

Zach and Ares flew forward as their auras pushed each other apart. The white and black masses in the sky pushed so hard against each other that there was a clear gap forming between them where the pressure of all that Death and energy could not help but be pushed back. The two fighters left their own auras as they shot into the gap created that turned into a sphere of open air around them as Zach's left forearm clashed with Ares' right. Zach only had a pair of black wings looking solid on his back with no dark wisps coming out of them, while Ares' body was surrounded in white light but became clearer when Zach got that close to him.

Their enormous powers were left behind, and their clash exploded out to their sides with white light and dark energy seeping into the sphere but getting pushed back by the two pressing into each other. Zach turned his left hand without twisting his arm as much, his wrist making movements normal arms could not. Ares eased his right arm to the side and made the blue light fire past the side of his face. He kneed up towards Zach's stomach, and Zach turned his body to the side while pulling his left arm back. Ares gripped him by that arm and started to squeeze, but he released to back up as Zach's right hand came swinging up with his fingers sticking out of the ripped black glove on Zach's hand.

Ares eased back then swiped his own right hand across his body, hitting Zach in the right wrist with a palm that sent Zach's right arm fully out to the side and opened him up for Ares left palm that nailed Zach in the chest. Zach coughed but kicked upwards while his upper body was getting slammed back, and he hit Ares under the chin as his enemy was leaning forward to follow up on that palm only to try and pull back at the last second. Ares snapped his left hand in though as Zach's foot was passing after hitting him in the chin, but as he was grabbing it Zach kicked his other foot at Ares' hand while also letting some Death out around the ankle his opponent had grabbed. Ares flicked his wrist and sent Zach's right foot into his approaching left, and Zach snapped his body back upwards after the palm to his chest that still hurt his aching body. He swung his left fist towards Ares' face, only for Ares to lean forward past it and right over Zach's right shoulder before Zach could continue raising that right hand for a new attack as he expected Ares might dodge the left.

Ares had not just dodged the left, but he also made it impossible for Zach to follow with the right. Zach's legs had hit each other and were turning Zach in midair too so his wings had just adjusted him and were mid-flap so in no position to swing around his sides and hit Ares who was already directly in front of him. Ares' head moved to the right side of Zach's while the younger boy's red eyes were still darting that way after the faster man. "You are skilled. However, I fought when the world was populated by warriors."

Zach's wings snapped to his right side, missing the man who was not even there when the wings fully hit the space he thought Ares was in. The way he swung those wings sent him flying backwards in a predictable way though, and Ares hovered on the inside of the gap between the powers they had left behind for this clash of combat skill. "Thousands of years of close combat," Ares continued while Zach was spinning around, only to see that the man he had spotted in his peripherals was dropping underneath him- yet flying above at the same moment, and yet the after-image Ares left behind regained its solid form as Zach looked down and up to try and focus on a single enemy.

The version of Ares Zach took his eyes off of shot forwards while Zach was turning his head to look behind him where the Ares who rose above and dropped below seemed to be going. "And you-" Ares tried to yank his head away, tried to swing his right fist harder and faster, but Zach also exploded out Death from the side he was turning to while suddenly slamming his elbow back the way of the fading Ares. His right elbow jammed into Ares' face and made Zach wince at the feeling of a deep gash near his right shoulder opening more. He turned back with his eyes flaring bright red and his gums black as he smirked at the man whose head snapped to the side with a drop of blood trickling out of his lip. "Maybe you've had all that time!" Zach yelled, while spinning and kicking his left leg at his enemy who shot backwards instead of taking it.

The white and black auras collapsed in on each other, and Zach shot in the way of Ares and his own power that he had flown out of a few seconds ago. His own massive black Death was pulling at Ares' back, but he had more inside him he had not been using that he covered himself with in that moment to trap Ares between Death and more Death. Zach sneered through the black veil coating his face, "But in the past few years how much time have you yourself spent fighting? Have you been training every day-" Zach shot at Ares while black whips of Death flew out of his approaching aura and shot on all sides of the villain to keep him from dodging.

A flare of white flew up out of Ares head and forward from the huge aura that slammed into Zach's back. Ares flew up through the hole in the dark trails ripped away by his power, then Zach flew right up into that white aura with his darkness pushing through above him while spinning around like a drill. It even made the shape of a spinning drill over the top of Zach's head as he chased after Ares into the huge white light that the older man had created earlier and which Zach could see was dimming. His huge black aura that had been pushing forward into it stopped pushing all over the sky as their energies fought, instead flooding up behind the drill that pushed through a single weak point in Ares aura that Zach had broken through. Zach yelled as he chased after Ares even into the God's own protective forcefield he drilled through faster each second, "Or did you get lazy because you think you know everything?! Every fighting style there is?!"

Zach's aura erupted around him, pushing out into the white veil as Ares spun and shot back down at him. Ares swung his arms up before reaching Zach, and Zach swerved to the left then got hit on his right side by a massive boulder that shot out of nowhere from below him. Wind crashed through the disappearing white veil as Ares stopped powering it, spinning Zach faster in the momentum Zach tried to use to his advantage in order to gain speed as he flapped his wings when he got hit by the boulder. Spinning too fast, he was unable to see the lake until a second too late to dodge and it hit him and washed his Death around the air, but ten black spikes that avoided it flew at Ares-

The God of War shot through the lake as some of Zach's Death attacked him outside of it. He flew through the water that he parted in front of him with the same power he used to raise it and surround Zach, and then all that Death that was swirling around the water uncontrollably stopped doing that and shot towards the parting of the waves.

Good thing I've had to deal with this multiple times today, Zach flew forward himself out of the water using his black wings that snapped behind him with barely a wisp getting pulled off in the liquid that had earlier been much harder to deal with. Death was stronger now though. The control had only been harder at the start, but once he got a grip on it he realized the amount of control he had was far beyond what he could normally do with the Death he allowed to flow through him in normal circumstances. He shot at Ares and swung both arms forward before reaching his enemy, extending long black arms at him that made Ares slam each of his own hands out to the sides and redirect Zach's arms out into the water he flowed faster to try and make Zach lose control again. "You don't know my fighting style, because I've created my own!" Zach sped faster up through the aura and passed right by Ares with a boost spinning him up above Ares' head.

The man with the War Quirk continued moving forward rather than stopping and turning to where Zach passed him. He dodged the blade Zach slashed down at his back, then spun and swiped his right hand smacking Zach across the face with the wind from swinging his arm that fast. Zach's head pushed against the force slamming into his face though, and he glared back at Ares with his black aura raging around him and violently spinning faster than it had before. It looked less and less like a smoke cloud moving around Zach and more like mist. The Death looked like granulated sand spinning around him and funneling over his arms and legs, splashing in and out of his body faster and faster in less a gaseous way but with a clear form and feeling of Death emanating off of it.

Zach created a dozen black blades sticking out of either of his arms. The backs of his calves ignited with darkness and started flaring but not yet shooting back behind him in jets that would send him forward. Those same kind of neutral engines formed inside his back and under his wings that narrowed and thinned but kept a solid form while his head transformed into a more aerodynamic shape. His hands turned into three-pronged claws, while knife blades stuck out of those palms and stayed hidden in the thicker cloudier Death, masking the solid forms Zach was making inside the black smoke. "You're out of practice," Zach growled. "Which means today may be the weakest time I would ever face you in our 'history' that you imagine, but it is also the day you are the weakest and least prepared to face me."

Ares' face intensified more even though Zach could see that what he was saying made his opponent more excited than anything. That made him grit his teeth inside the darkness and snap his arms behind him, his whole body firing off the jets of Death as his attack started. "I fought every day for a year against thousands of different Quirks! You fought your wars back when the people of this world still used guns and swords as their main weapons!" Zach sped at his enemy, and he flipped and spun and spiraled diagonally while releasing the blades out from his arms and then gripping the knives he made inside his already sharp talons. His wings snapped up above him and dropped him down below before his jets exploded out much stronger and made it so his dodge resulted in a counterattack right behind Ares who just slammed a beam of white light forward at Zach's initial approach.

Ares swung his left hand down with a larger sphere of white energy than the ones that had created the lake-sized crater down below them that rain was falling into now from the earlier telekinetic attacks Ares had used the lake for. Zach swung his arms forward and released the knives in curves around the sphere towards Ares, then he gripped the energy with both arms and clawed his six talons into the sphere which almost immediately shredded them apart. He was able to redirect its trajectory slightly away though and also use those arms that were about to rip apart in order to slingshot himself up towards where Ares dodged the two black knives. Ares sped forward faster though as he dodged between the knives, moving forward to where Zach just slung up and tried to stop short as Ares was suddenly in front of him with his right fist swinging forward.

Zach's chest bulged with Death as Ares' fist swung towards him with power behind it so strong Zach could imagine the ground behind and down below him was going to shred. Ares fist slammed right in front of Zach's chest and stopped, and all the Death that Zach was collecting there blew around his sides first before Zach's body went flying through that wind of Death and out the other side. He flew all the way out of the sky leaving a black trail and some red that splashed out of Zach's mouth from the force that just slammed into him head-on.

"Despite all your posturing," Ares flew down through the air and stared down at the new crater he just made with Zach's body in the lower slope of one of the mountains in the range now more cracked than the others directly around it. "Your skills are still far below my own. Maybe I am not as strong as I would be should I have spent every minute of the past hundred years training, or even the past decade…" Ares grinned down at the teen who still gripped the stone at his sides and struggled back to one knee, then the other. He called down to his opponent who had blood spilling out the corners of his mouth, down his right arm and that side of his body, around the right side of his face, and more dried blood on his stomach and chest though the wounds there had closed up.

"But you never truly forget when it comes to combat," Ares continued in a teaching tone. He lowered himself down more and closer to his opponent who was panting and lifted a dented left arm to rub over his mouth, smearing his fake skin there with blood. "I am a master of every martial arts ever invented. Your fighting style may be unique, but, it is just a combination of many other styles I have seen and that were adapted by people you learned from and observed over your time in battle." Zach wheezed out a couple more breaths as he felt his lungs constricting. He forced himself not to cough as he felt blood filling his throat, swallowing it down instead and just narrowing his dim red eyes at the enemy ahead of him.

Zach stopped panting. He spread his unsteady legs out and rose his arms with darkness covering them up again, and his eyes glowing a brighter red once more. "It must be obvious to you by now," Ares scolded the teen ahead of him who was standing in a fighting stance as if he was just going to continue this fight. "You are not yet at my level. You have shown me all you have, and you can barely-"

"Why did you pull your punch?" Zach asked.

Ares paused and stopped speaking at Zach's question. He closed his mouth while the young man down on the surface spoke darkly up to him, "The speed I just flew down here was not the fastest I could have dropped. I was able to soften the second blow of my collision with the ground, as there was not as much force in your punch as I expected." Zach lifted his head with his eyebrows narrowed in towards his nose. His eyes were raised just below those dark eyebrows and red glowed out from the shadows cast by his long wavy hair that had black wisps coming out of it. His voice deepened as he continued up to his enemy, "Earlier you punched straight through my Quirk. You flew through Death as if it were nothing to you and even allowed me to touch you with my right hand." Zach's smirk rose but did not match the intense and angry tone of his voice as he continued to the ancient man before him.

"So why didn't you follow through this time? Was it that you didn't want to punch through all that darkness around my chest, so you just used the force of your pulled punch instead? I've noticed Ares, a change in your patterns." Zach's voice got louder and his body stopped looking so weak, and he rose up off the ground with darkness pushing out the soles of his feet. Wings ripped out of his back again and reformed the solid flight mechanisms in their optimal form that did not waste any Death. Ares did not say anything yet which kept Zach speaking in a more taunting tone that Ares had just started to use himself as he accused Zach of fighting when there was no chance. "You acted like you weren't afraid of Death," Zach snarled. "Acted like because you were far stronger than any of my other opponents, Death would not work on you. Yet there's only one conclusion I can come to when you have started dodging my attacks, or blowing them away using the force from your punches and kicks, or your aura, rather than using your body itself… You feel yourself getting weaker."

Ares tilted his head back and his expression was straight as he stared down the boy calling him out on this. Zach continued calling out at the sight of that expression, "You will only get weaker and weaker through the fight-"

"And you?" Ares wondered back. "What of your power?"

Zach stopped shouting and he started panting again as raising his voice that loud was hard. He had been covering more of his body in Death again though, and that meant his panting breaths were easy to see as the dark smoke pulled in and out in front of his mouth. Ares' breath hung in the air as well, simply due to the cold over the Muindo Mountains. That cold suddenly made Zach feel chills though. Even inside his dark aura and with his blood pumping fast, his adrenaline spiking, Zach felt chills at the look on Ares' face.

"Does it not drop over time?" Ares questioned, then his voice got lower. "Hahahah," Ares chuckled in a low voice that echoed through the sky, and he lowered his right hand down to his side with the air around him getting hazier and his breath freezing in midair. Zach's breath of Death hitched and froze in midair too, as Ares shifted his eyes away from their locked eye contact. "I suppose there is a way that may not be true…" Zach's heart skipped a beat, and his eyes shook as the white light around Ares' hand turned bright blue and then a much, much darker blue as the entire atmosphere blackened around them. "I should make sure you have no way to rejuvenate yourself."

"Wai- stop it-" Zach could not raise his voice loud enough, as he saw which way Ares was looking and started turning that way himself.

Ares moved his left hand over to his right and curled it over the top of the energy condensing there. The sky shook with Ares' movements and the ground down below him started to break apart. Pieces of earth rose up off the ground, small at first and then larger and larger chunks lifting. Some of those large chunks were not even just pieces of scattered debris, but rocks and boulders getting ripped out of stone surfaces down below.

This is insane- Zach had never felt any power like the surge he was feeling in front of him now. He swung his arms forward, firing out two huge arms of Death towards Ares who let out a yell, "HAAA!" A white pulse of energy expanded out from him in a perfect sphere that ripped apart those black arms and knocked Zach twenty feet backwards through the air. In that same moment, the dark blue energy between Ares' hands grew larger, and brighter even as the sky shook and the clouds spun fast up above their heads.

"It's just you and me." Ares stared down his opponent one last time, then he let out a heavy breath and both of his arms bulged up near his shoulders and around his biceps. The power he had collected seemed to weigh a million pounds, as his every movement appeared to be the hardest thing Zach had seen Ares do as his whole expression strained on pushing his arms forward.

"No," Zach sped backwards, then he spun and he shot across the air as fast as he could, right in the path that Ares had turned and started pushing his arms forward in.

Ares' eyes were squinting as he shoved his arms forward, but they widened as his own breath hitched only for him to scream out as there was no stopping now. "Raaa- RAAAAAA- HAAAAAAAAA!" Ares shoved his arms fully away from him as the energy was already expanding, and he needed to attack as he could not just let it all explode there. DON'T! Ares thought towards his enemy who curved inwards and flew right in the path of the enormous dark blue beam that got brighter despite not getting any lighter in shade except right on the edges where it was thinnest. The core of the beam was already hundreds of feet wide though only milliseconds after Ares shoved his arms forward, and it grew even wider as the God of War who charged it screamed out at its back.

"MIDORIYA!" Zach screamed, while Midoriya was turning his head from the valley he had shot back over to not thirty seconds ago. He felt he needed to move the unconscious army of assassins who were in danger from being this close to the action without being able to protect themselves. Not all of those assassins were unconscious anymore, some of them up and actually facing off against Midoriya who they either yelled at in confusion, or yelled at not to interrupt their God…

Deku heard his friend's voice echoing deep and scratchy through the sky in his direction. The ground was already shaking worse than it had the entire night, which had unnerved the boy who was not directly next to the battle anymore but a full mile and a half away from it. Zach had shown he had more tricks up his sleeve and was able to keep fighting against this monster in a way Midoriya knew he could not. There were things he could do to help though, to make sure that Zach's full release of power did not result in the deaths of all these men and women. He did not know why Zach screamed his name, but he turned along with the others who were awake near where he had brought them earlier for their own safety.

They all looked towards the black blur shooting through the sky, and they all had to squint as the sky filled with bright light behind him. The ground shook far worse, and avalanches and rockslides started in every direction as the Korean Peninsula shook like it had not the entire night. They felt it at the coasts. They felt it in the big cities and the small towns and on every farm. The ocean raged with the waves growing larger and rougher as Ares fired off the largest attack Zach or Midoriya had ever seen before.

Zach could see it in his peripheral vision chasing after him. He had flown into its path because he knew where it was directed. He knew the method that Ares was going to take away any chance of him regaining his lost power. There was no time to think about it. Zach flew straight towards the curly-haired teen his own age who was still opening his eyes wider as he stared towards a beam of light so wide and tall and spread out and that was approaching him faster than he was prepared to do anything about. Zach landed directly in front of Midoriya and spun around as fast as he could, swinging both arms in front of him and pulling his wings from his back to his arms that they flooded out of along with every last bit of Death he had inside him. "HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH- HAAAAAA!"

The wall of Death Zach just created got hit, and on either side of Zach and Midoriya blue light shot past them so fast that they were completely surrounded in blue in the same second. The sky above them was blue. On both their left and right sides there was nothing but blue light. Midoriya darted his eyes down to his right and saw the ground breaking apart closer to him, from fifteen feet away to ten, more of the stone below his feet cracking and tearing into the light that it completely shredded away in.

Midoriya turned his head farther around as Zach screamed out at the top of his lungs. He still could not breathe himself as he looked back and saw that the blue light passing them on both sides pulled back in after getting split by the black wall pushing as hard as Zach could against it. Midoriya's eyes widened as he saw one of the last assassins in the area reaching towards him, only for the light to engulf him as well and rip the skin from his flesh in the first millisecond, then it shattered the bones under his melting muscles that ripped away in the force of the energy.

"AHHH AHHHHH!" Zach screamed as he saw the blue light on the other side of wall, cracking through it and shredding the edges of it where his Quirk was weakest. The ground below him cracked more and he started losing his balance, making it harder to focus on keeping every last bit of his power in front of him and Midoriya who was wobbling at his back. The chunk of ground they were on became all that was left of the surface of the valley around them as the beam had stretched too far down too and was breaking apart even their last remaining footholds.

What is this?! What's happening?! Midoriya's heart raced faster as the heat bore down on him. His face sweat, his feet lost balance on the stone below him that cracked too much and started to break apart. He started leaning backwards, his heels tilting back on the stone upturning below him. The back of his head got hotter-

Deku's eyes bulged, as Zach's left hand snapped backwards and grabbed him by the waistband of his pants. He pulled in, and Midoriya fell to his butt but closer to Zach than to the back of the tiny space getting even smaller now as there was less Death pushing against the beam. The floor below them broke, and Zach screamed out as the wall he tried to reinforce by slamming his left hand forward again just broke even more apart. The front of his body was completely covered in Death, and Midoriya was sitting behind his legs staring forward in disbelief as the blue light broke through the wall and slammed into them-

Zach leaned forward and screamed at the top of his lungs. His arms crossed and the black aura surrounding the front of his body pushed forward, splitting the blue beam that pushed into him and right into his face that he leaned into it. "RRRAAAAAA!" Zach's deep voice scratched out through the sky out of the beam that tore through the protective aura all around him. Midoriya could feel the heat from between Zach's legs that he had parted and were digging down farther into the ground that broke apart below them, yet still the beam did not get past Zach. Zach felt all the skin on his right arm searing, as it was on his face and legs…

Then the back of the beam passed them.

Zach was frozen where he stood. He froze mouth wide open in mid-scream as the beam passed and there was nothing left to block with the Death he had surrounding him and that was now pushing forward away from his body. That Death faded away into nothing and Zach blinked a few times with the world tinting back to its normal shade, not even with a red glow to it now. His left arm was devoid of any of the fake skin that usually covered it, and his right was bloodier now than below. His face was burned and his hair singed, some of his bangs burnt off in a weird way though his hair had been mostly Death throughout the attack.

There was nothing on either side of Zach's feet. The ground just dropped thirty feet from the stone pillar that Zach dropped down to his right knee on, wincing as that knee was singed like his left and his shins. He had guarded his vital areas with the strongest Death and so he still maintained rags around his waist to his lower thighs where fibers of the material waved around behind him in the strong wind that returned after all the air had been blown away. The ground underneath the two felt so unsound like it could crack and collapse at any moment. Midoriya could barely take his eyes off of Zach's back, and yet he still managed to turn his head partially to the side to see how much of the ground behind them was left standing too.

They're all… Midoriya started to think, but his thoughts of the other people who had been there trailed off as he saw what was behind him. Or rather, Midoriya saw what was not behind him that made him lose any capability to speak or think, let alone breathe. His eyes were the size of saucers and remained that way, just as Zach's grew almost as wide as he turned his head slightly to the side too and saw what was behind them.

Zach had seen this side when he approached Midoriya at full speed before spinning to face the beam. He had seen the mountain ahead of him slightly off-angled to his right, along with the taller one almost perfectly aligned with the beam's path farther ahead of that mountain another couple of miles away. Zach was breathing in heavily as he glanced back, but he gasped it out and knelt there in shock for a moment as he did not see the mountain that should have been straight ahead of him. He would have thought that he was looking in the wrong place, if not for the one slightly to their right which had a hole in it that took away the entire summit along with most of the north side from east to west. The new top of that mountain curved over the empty gap to show a perfect crescent shape carved through the mountain as if a hole had been blown through it, which it had been. "That's, crazy," Zach whispered hoarsely, in a cracked voice that sounded so nervous and scared, and yet it made Midoriya flinch as well at the sound of it…

---

Crreeaaak- CRACK!

"AHHHH-"

"Eee- EEEAAAH-"

"Everyone quiet!" The booming voice that shouted came out in a tone none of the citizens of the Anguong farming community were ready to hear from the hero helping them. Wonder Man took in a deep breath after silencing the crowd that was about to start panicking due to the loud screams of a few people who had gotten spooked by the most recent set of vicious tremors. All those people looked to the hero who flew up in the air above the civilians he had gotten to evacuate their homes and stand out on a field so that nothing would fall on them during the earthquakes.

Someone needs to do something. G-Man, I'll be the recon we need to figure out what's going on in there. Wonder Man stared towards the mountains where the most violent storm he had ever seen was raging above and around even the summits at the edge of the range. "What we need to do now is remain calm above all else," Wonder Man continued in a loud voice for the citizens below who were starting to feel uneasy about the direction their hero was looking with such a determined expression forming on his face. "Other heroes are on their way from all sides of Korea to help make sure that you-"

"Don't leave us, Wonder Man!" one of the women of the village shouted. She was the old woman who told Wonder Man that they could use her farm as a gathering place for all her neighbors. "We need you to stay and protect us!"

"You will be safe as long as you stay here and out of the way of-"

"W-Wait!"

"Wonder Man! Don't go over there!"

The tone in the citizens' voices started to make the third ranked hero in the nation feel uneasy. He looked down and saw faces that reminded him far too much of the way Cataphault and Bogseo had looked when G-Man started talking about his real reason for being stationed out in the countryside. He saw fear on the faces of the citizens, mostly from the older ones, but he could see those looks traveled down through the generations all the way to the children who were looking at their parents in fear and terror as if they already knew what was causing this catastrophe.

"Wonder Man, hold back and wait until everyone's out here," G-Man suddenly ordered into the earpiece that Wonder Man was wearing. Wonder Man did not know if G-Man could hear the civilians on the other side of his headset or if maybe his tone had given it away to the other hero coordinating efforts as well, but he reached up and turned off his communicator to get some silence.

I'm tired of waiting around. Wonder Man glared into the mountains where the origin of these earthquakes was located. There's bound to be a reason for this. Be it the Army of Death, some villain hiding in the range, or something supernatural even. I won't rule anything out.

"Wonder Man please! I beg of you!"

Wonder Man looked down and saw that older woman stepping closer to him on her field below. She shook her head at the man hovering over her property that was one of the closest to the Muindo Range. Her family had lived there for generations, passing down stories of plagues and famines and wars, and yet there was only one thing she feared in this world. She looked at Wonder Man with scared eyes that were clear even on her withered face. "Please, stay out of there."

Everyone in the community looked towards the elder begging this of Wonder Man. "There's nothing to be done about what lurks in those mountains. There's nothing you can do to stop it."

"What is in there?" Wonder Man asked.

"The beast!"

"The demons!"

"The Angunguong!"

"We don't know!"

"Just stay here! Protect us and… and don't die for nothing!" A younger man and guide in the mountains who had lost his mentor twenty years ago to an "accident" in the Muindo Range yelled up.

Wonder Man looked around at all the citizens so worried about his life. I'm sorry. As a hero, he rose his gaze back up to the mountains. I must…

The hero's jaw dropped. He froze in place and the rest of the citizens looking towards him spun back around to the mountains where a bright light just flashed. It was not lightning this time. That, they could all see for sure.

"Oh my…"

"God help us."

Another man opened his mouth, but he just dropped to his knees and then pulled his hands together in front of his chest. He bowed his head into those hands and clenched his eyes shut to stop having to see the insane and impossible beam of light that just tore through a mountain and into the clouds.

Wonder Man lifted his head and watched as the beam that ripped through so many clouds vanished up above the ones over his head. Most of those clouds got pulled away from the Muindo Range only for clouds on either side of the dragged ones to pull in and collapse over, making the storm worse than ever with lightning cracking all over the space the beam just passed through. The hero who considered himself very strong turned back and looked towards the Muindo Range.

Even over fifty miles away from it, Wonder Man had been able to see a mountain in the range that was no longer visible to him. The storm got worse out there while the world's shaking started to die down, and Wonder Man just stared forward at miles of land where rocks were falling out of the sky and all over the abandoned forests and fields and failed towns at the edge of the Muindo Range. The community he was in was only twenty miles from a failed town with not much between the farms here and that town that had to be abandoned long ago. Wonder Man watched as huge rocks fell out of the sky in the distance and crushed buildings, rolling across forests and knocking down all the trees in their wake.

"I…" Wonder Man glanced down at the people below him. "I have to stay here, and protect you people." He reached up and turned back on his communicator, to hear G-Man yelling at him for a response after that set of most horrible earthquakes yet. Other heroes were on the line shouting about what they had felt so far away as many of them were still gathering in their cities and preparing to leave. Others were on the road but they had stopped their cars on highways when the ground shook like that. He heard someone over the link shout against this being anything but a natural phenomenon after such a powerful earthquake, and Wonder Man had to disagree, "It wasn't natural."

His voice was a welcomed relief to G-Man and Cataphault who were each worried about what he was going to do all on his own. The tone of his voice shut up the rest of the heroes though over the link and all their sidekicks and support staff listening to him. Wonder Man gulped as he realized something else, Even if someone could make an attack like that, why would they? What, are they fighting? Does that mean… there are two people with this kind of power out there? What happens… if the wrong one wins?

---

"That's, crazy," Zach's whisper made Midoriya flinch and turn his head back forward, seeing the sideways face of his friend looking back at the same damage he had just witnessed. Midoriya stared back at Zach's face with his heart pounding even harder and his breath still stuck in his throat. He looked into Zach's eyes, and he saw excitement the moment before Zach turned back around himself.

Zach turned forward, and he got up off his burnt knee to stand on wobbly legs. He smacked his hands down on his legs and growled through the pain, blood seething through his teeth as he made such a guttural noise. Zach stared ahead of him towards the figure flying through the half-mile wide trench that separated him and Ares. Ares was laughing as he shot across the gap towards his opponent who survived an attack he was worried Zach might not be able to handle.

"Z-Zach," Midoriya shook his head around and got up, panting hard and staring at his friend's back with his eyes still the size of plates. "We have to, take him on together."

There's no one left here to protect. The only people I can protect is everyone outside of this range who Ares can kill if we let him leave here. Midoriya's expression hardened despite the fear he felt of this opponent he now believed beyond all doubt was the strongest villain they had ever faced before. "Let's formulate a strategy-"

"Stay out of this." Zach's snarl came out angry at the suggestion Midoriya was making behind him. Zach ground his teeth, and he hunched his body forward with his back bubbling with Death down along his spine. "Get the fuck out of my way. You don't stand a chance." Zach slammed his right hand down into the edge of the stone pillar in front of him, then he dug the fingers of his left hand into the rock face next to his right. Out of his back spiked eight long Death spines and around his back and sides wrapped an aura of darkness that flared like spiky hair all over his body.

His fingers digging into the stone dug in easier and farther as they became sharpened by Death. His eyes flared red as he reached deep inside and grabbed out whatever was left within him and surrounded his body. "Grrrrr… GRRRrrrrrr…" Zach's growl got deeper, venomous and snarling as his body transformed to look more like a four-legged beast bending its forelegs or Zach's arms. "They were your own followers. They considered you a God, and you-" Zach's voice oozed hatred like none Midoriya had ever heard before. The combination of every single thing Ares had said so far, all of Eziano's actions, Fergus's, and now this last attack as Ares wiped out his own soldiers…

In Zach's head flashed a room of a hundred and fifty people all holding up a shot glass. A few like him had nothing but water in theirs, as the rest got ready to take a shot of Pinroq Kamouev from the bottles they looted at King's compound during their most successful raid ever. They were about to flee and let the Russian and Eastern European heroes take all the credit. King was already in the heroes' possession and had accepted the deal with them on what he and all his captured men were going to say happened, just as the heroes had. All those soldiers with their helmets off looking his way as he was supposed to make a toast, because Michael shouted at him to do one. Gentle had given him a shove on his back, and he remembered the look in Exodus' eyes like he was expecting something profound even as he was just trying to let them all have the small moment of celebration he never really let them have at any other time.

He could name every single person he saw as that image flashed in his mind. As he saw himself turning and looking in a three hundred and sixty degree angle of himself at all the faces looking back. All his smiling friends and subordinates and comrades who had fought and died by his side. Zach flew up off the ground with demonic-looking bat-like wings ripping out of his spiked back, and Ares called at his opponent, "I'm surprised you still have anything left to give!"

He just killed my only means of getting back more Death, which means that I was right and Ares doesn't want me getting any stronger for this fight. Ares thinks we'll be fighting forever, but he also thought for sure that he could win at the start of this one. He took me too lightly. Ares' huge smile lowered down and stayed in a slight grin but got as serious as ever as he stared into that spinning darkness around what he thought was probably Zach's head based on the dark red glows coming from behind it.

Midoriya was dropping out of the air, as Zach had shot up off the pillar too hard that it broke apart below him. He jumped backwards too though, while staring at Zach in disbelief at the sight of the amount of Death Zach was still able to muster even after he thought all of it had been destroyed blocking that last attack. Midoriya dropped down to the new surface at the bottom of the massive trench that stretched so far to either side of him that he was trying to avoid looking to the edges where he would be reminded of how powerful their enemy was. I don't stand a chance? Zach, you can't match this! I admit you're stronger than me, but I'll get behind Ares and help you here. Maybe you know I will. Maybe, you just want Ares to think you're acting a certain way. I know you're not a monster… But that kind of focus, even after this?! Midoriya was astonished by the focus he could feel from Zach as his friend stared down Ares with a body resembling a monster's.

Ares grew in size. His right hand opened up while down on his side, and rocks flew up from the ground down below up into his palm. They merged together, crushed by the pressure of his curling hand into the shape of a hilt that got pounded together longer by more rocks rising up. Some kind of metal rose up out of the ground as well, and lightning flew down and slammed into the ore as it reached the end of the stone staff Ares was growing. His body reached twelve feet tall, and his eyes narrowed while glowing white, his ashy blond hair waving around behind his head in the wind that surrounded his flying form. The steel that forged at the end of his stone weapon created the shape of a massive axe-head, while the butt of the staff got bumpier and wider than the rest to form a war hammer of stone.

Zach's black claws snapped out to his sides, and they gripped around hilts of long black blades that flared out and that he slashed together in front of him. He is weakening. Weakening? Look behind you. The trench goes for miles through the planet. He tore through mountains with that last attack. An attack he charged. One that strained him. One that took a lot of his power, more than he's likely used in thousands of… Ever? Other than to test his strength- and the last time he did that would have been when he was much weaker. He just used all of his power for that. I know because of the charge time. It has to be. Zach erased the doubt from his mind after imagining the damage done by Ares' last attack due to the fear he felt because of it. Erasing the doubt was a necessity and so he did it. He decided not to question if that was Ares' strongest and just that it was, because questioning that would cause him to be cautious at a time when he did not have enough strength to keep the fight going for much longer. Thoughts did not cross his mind that usually would have thanks to his experience and fighting prowess, due to the inherent knowledge of how his own fear could affect his fighting style.

And he knew that attacking now and right away without giving Ares a moment to talk to him was the most important thing. Ares opened his mouth but Zach flew at his enemy without hesitation. He just took Ares' largest attack straight on, and he flew at Ares and swung his blades at the man who spun his war hammer-ax around in front of him and parried both. He knocked them both to the left while making it out like he was going to knock them up. The legs Zach was kicking upwards in preparation for his body opening from Ares' parry were now not angled on target, but a third leg kicked out of Zach's left side because Ares parrying to his left meant that Zach was turned to the right.

Zach's left side closest to Ares expelled a leg that kicked Ares in the stomach. The toe of Zach's new foot was just touching Ares, when Ares kicked around with his own right leg while making it out like he was reaching for Zach's black leg with his left hand. Ares slammed his leg into Zach's side and allowed that black foot to touch him, but the trade off did not feel worth it to Zach who felt his sprained and fractured ribs crack this time. They made loud cracking noises too, while Zach was sent flying through the air out from above the trench and into the slope of a mountain he bounced and rolled along the side of.

Ares flew right after Zach and he slammed his right fist down as Zach spiraled out of his roll with his arms rising fully black and extending out again. Ares knew this attack already though and popped Zach's arms out to the sides, while also kneeing upwards with a beam of white coming off that knee as he would not just use the same deflection strategy of slamming his arms out that he had done the last time. As Zach's arms were pushed out to either side though by Ares' swings, as they were the last time, Zach's body down below that was about to get hit by a white beam broke apart into a black rushing mist that shot straight upwards at Ares and all around the beam that none of the Death was caught by.

Ares pulled up. He turned to the right, dodging one of the arms that he had slammed out to the side and that had transformed into a falcon-shaped Death object that shot right past him. It broke off its wings into smaller birds that shot back at Ares above and below him, but Ares was more focused on the other initial arm he deflected away using only force so that he would not have to touch any Death. So far, he had not been touched by any Death in this clash, but the wave flying up from below, the twin birds flying above and below, and the full version of Zach that had come out of the second arm he deflected were all coming too fast and all at once.

He dodged the top of the birds and flew much higher into the sky. All of the Death down below changed directions and flew up after him, but Zach separated it farther and farther from himself as he flew up. Two birds split into four. The wave of Death from his old body that was rising up in a large encompassing wave split apart and turned into several black pillars that rose up on his sides but many meters away from him. Those pillars flew up faster and started to resemble human shapes at the tops of them. Keep what's below moving up to the top constantly. Empty the middle of large shapes and make the external Death seem larger and more dangerous. Forcing him... Zach continued to fly up, though he dodged better than some of his hollow black pillars that got pierced through by white beams Ares fired at them to lower the amount of attacks he had to worry about as they all chased after him. To waste more energy only hurting tiny amounts of Death. Not much wasted. Not hard to reform.

Zach stopped for a moment in the air, brought his elbows down to his sides, and he yelled out, "HAAAA!" A black wind pushed out of his back, and he punched his arms out to the sides and sent most of his aura flying away from him in the shape of two more pillars of Death. The wind flying out of his back turned more into a cape. That cape flew off of him though and curved upwards like a thin wall behind him, stretching out to the sides.

He's lower than he'd have me believe. Now that he's confirmed his Quirk can actually do something, he expects me not to touch any of it. Even small amounts will compound and make me gradually weaker. Ares continued to fly upwards, his thoughts moving as fast as Zach's as he faced an enemy for the first time in millennia who had the power to keep facing him after this long. He could not help but smile. Even fighting Aurellio the day we met, this fight is harder. Harder than many fights from my days as a mortal man. He is more than a warrior, or a God. He is my greatest rival ever. Ares spun around and he brought down the clouds from above him, surrounding himself and Zach in the darkness and dampness of the storm.

"They say you bring the storm," Ares called out through the clouds where his figure became impossible to see to his enemy somewhere ahead of him. "But you aren't the one making it. Can you even handle the intense winds up here? Do they not pull the Death from your body? Can your smaller creations survive?!"

His voice is coming from all around. He still believes himself in control of the situation despite losing some overconfidence. He's always thought of me as a worthy adversary though. Ares can't see in here. He may be able to feel vibrations in the air and he'll be able to tell where it's coming from, but what if he's more right about the wind than he thought? He's been avoiding even the smallest amounts of Death because he knows they will compile. His "maximum" power means nothing anymore. What he did just then was not even his full strength. I touched him with my bare hand, and he is acting in a way as if I've weakened him. He must have been so far above me. He wasn't showing his full strength at first and has only got much stronger instead of getting any weaker, which he still hasn't really shown. Not through his speed and power at least. But he is acting weaker. Which means he is weaker…

The forms and pillars Zach brought into the clouds were breaking apart though there were pieces of them that stayed together more. He did not have a wide variety of ranges for his creations' sizes. There were either the large pillars and two small birds just slightly larger than the others had been, or the thin wind of Death he released out between those masses that he expected Ares may notice. At the same time, he flew forward himself towards one of the loudest echoes in the clouds where he thought Ares could be.

Winds slammed into Zach in the direction he flew, knocking him down a bit and right into a bolt of lightning in mid-formation that made him lose track of his thoughts and his Quirk control. He had barely any Death around his actual body, and he started dropping out of the air. Fortunately, his own plan had worked in that same moment. He fell from the clouds that exploded out in all directions, as Ares noticed there was Death mixed in with the clouds around him that were pitch black because of the violent nature of his storm. All of the Death flying around inside the clouds because of the fast winds was sent out in all directions, then it all flew down after Zach who turned himself back to face into the sky where Ares just hit him with a tiny piece of that explosion of force.

Knocked back into his senses a bit, Zach rose his arms that wrapped in snakes of Death while most of the rest of that aura pulled right behind his back. He had to create wings to stop from falling any farther. Ares shot down after him, but the snakes of darkness that wrapped Zach's arms slithered back out to his hands. He grabbed the ends of the long tendrils of darkness that continued to move as if with minds of their own. It was hard to move his burnt arms, harder now because the lightning had messed with his left arm and the rest of his body just as much though less permanently. He was twitching, but he did not need to swing his arms for the black tendrils to crack like whips across the sky ahead of him and extend all the way up to a dropping Ares who spiraled to his left then stopped his descent completely as those whips changed direction to chase him.

He's slower. Zach thought it while tasting the blood in his mouth. He realized his eyes were squinting closer together, and despite what he just noticed, he knew he was weaker as well. There was no need to think about his own weakness in that moment though. He had no Trigger on him and thus it was a moot point to consider how weak he was. Rather he considered how best to utilize his remaining Death without wasting any as it became more vital each passing second. Even maintaining wings at this point was difficult, but it was better than forcing out Death below his feet which would waste it for no reason.

Ares could see it even in Zach's red eyes. The excitement simmered inside him for a moment as there was a different look to the kind of intensity his opponent was showing him now compared to earlier. He's, still planning on winning, Ares saw it. The young man facing him was not questioning whether or not he could win. The question did not look to even cross his mind. He's seen the difference in our strength and it doesn't matter. I showed him the gap in our strength, but he believes his skills exceed mine. Zach, you truly are… Ares' smile returned with a vengeance, curling higher up than ever with the corners pulling towards his ears, because he felt his heart start to race in a way so long forgotten to him.

"What are you smiling at?!" Zach flew at his enemy whose expression was childlike, full of glee and excitement. The most prolific murderer of all time. Zach's body was fueled with the kind of hatred that cleared his mind so that he would be the most efficient fighter he could be. He raced at Ares who backed through the sky without having to make any flight motions that Zach needed to do manually with his wings. Zach had to chase the man who flew smoother and with more angles of movement because his control had been honed across centuries rather than across months.

Zach brought more of the Death he had inside him as part of his defensive mechanism out into his wings on his next flap that had been looking just like all the others he was chasing Ares with. He had already sped up, but he only expanded his wings at the last second during his flap that gave him an even faster boost that Ares was not expecting. Zach lost the blades in his hands as he pulled more Death to his back, but Ares noticed some of that Death had trailed away as well and was moving in strange patterns much farther away from them that it could not affect their fight.

What is he planning? It's so interesting! Ares rose up his left hand and called the ax he had created back to his hand. In that same moment he brought up his right over his shoulder and curled it around a bolt of lightning that formed in his grasp. Sparks flew off the bolt that he held there as Zach flew straight at him. Zach was under a second away from the enemy who stopped flying backwards but did not change directions to move forwards and shorten the time between them. Ares just held and created the bolt, and Zach knew he could not pull back and let Ares charge a longer attack after what he saw the last time Ares had that time.

Zach slammed his right hand into his own chest and tore a hole between his exposed scarred-up pecs. He ripped a curved blade out from the darkness he pooled there, and he slashed it upwards right as Ares threw forwards towards Zach's upper left side. Ares' eyes widened and he shot back farther, as the end of Zach's blade slashed out a wind of Death towards him. It missed to his left but then pulled towards where he was dodging straight back. Ares had to yank himself harder to his own right, focusing partly back on that wind slash now as he had been too focused on Zach's swing of his blade itself. The swing had sent that multi-layered attack flying at him, but the more impressive part of it was how Zach had predicted and sliced fast enough to cut through the bolt of electric energy Ares had thrown at him.

Zach shot forward as the sparks split around his sides. He flapped his wings while controlling the slash which consisted of part of the blade he just swung, as he did not have enough of his remaining Death on his person to send any excess flying from the blade. He reshaped the sword he had pulled from his chest where there were still a few small pockets of Death stored for security. Zach lifted the katana he had out now, then he snapped his right hand out in the shape of a gun after he tossed the blade's hilt to his left hand. Ares had suddenly shifted and flown through the black wind he was dodging from. The God of War split it with a swing down of his arm that created too much of a wind for Zach's own Death Wind to survive. The wind pulled back together and shot towards Zach to reconnect with him, while Ares did a front-flip in the air and extended his body with the thin black line fired from Zach's right index finger shooting just below his chest.

Ares spun out of his front flip and punched at the enemy who shot at him and slammed his own left fist forward. Ares pushed harder into it, but he had to yank back as a wisp of darkness came out of Zach's left fingers. Zach had not been able to focus much Death down there, but he made a wisp come out that he had prepared before even punching so that Ares would yank away. Ares realized that as the single wisp that emerged faded and his hand pulling back showed that Zach's knuckles had not even turned black with Death in that moment.

Where is his Quirk? Ares could see there was barely any Death in use on his enemy's body, but Zach shot at him and kicked up a slash of Death more powerful than the swipe from his sword a minute ago. Ares flipped around the ax he was holding down at his left side, then he spun it around in front of his body so fast it looked like a fan. The Death in front of him all got pulled down into a visible wind funnel that shot back in Zach's direction and engulfed him.

Right through the middle, Zach's wings sucked into his back and shot out of his chest in the middle of the wind funnel. The force of the funnel was strongest on its spinning edges, but the funnel was thin enough that it had caught Zach with both the top and bottom of the wind force. It started spinning Zach around, cartwheeling him through the sky, but Ares let go of his weapon that he was spinning with both hands and pulled his arms away fast.

His body shot backwards using his flight and he yelled out, "HA!" The force of the shockwave from how fast he flew backwards sent the piercing line of Death breaking apart and scattering into the wind that ripped off the dying out twister he made. That thin black line had moved so fast that it pierced through the hilt of Ares' weapon right between his hands, then hit him in the chest before he was able to pull backwards. His eyes darted to his right and left as the shockwave destroyed the line that just hit him, that he had just felt. It's so light, but it's gathering around me. He had it farther in the distance a minute ago. As scattered as it was, the closer it gets the more combined it becomes.

Ares could not focus on the thin black wisps a half mile away, up in the clouds, snaking across the ground in tiny movements that were barely visible to the eye because of how faint the Death moving there was. Zach was too quick to react to Ares breaking apart that last weapon, and without the wind funnel pushing him without his control he was able to recreate his wings and fly back in Ares' direction. More of it is gone. I can't call more to myself. Only what I have left.

Zach's red eyes flared brighter, even as his internal defenses and reserves ran on dry. One sword. Two wings. Eyes. All I can use as I continue laying my traps. He's noticed, but he still believes I have no chance. He could fly away out of the area of effect, but he'll wait too long. Zach's enemy brought up his right hand, and across the sky flew his sword into his hand. He had smirked when Zach's single blade formed down on his right side. Both of Zach's hands were down on the hilt as he flew horizontally through the air at his enemy. Ares slashed his sword down from his right shoulder to his left side, then lifted up to his left shoulder and slashed back down to the right side of his waist where he held the blade with one hand and held his left palm out in front of him pointed at Zach.

Ares turned that palm back towards himself and tilted his fingers out in Zach's direction, then he curled inwards towards himself. Zach thought maybe he would feel a tug from his opponent's seemingly telekinetic powers, but the movement was sheerly a taunting motion and nothing more. It beckoned him forward to attempt the challenge Zach was making by flying straight at him with barely any Death use and only a single weapon for combat. All of the white aura around Ares vanished, and other than the sword all he was using was his ability to fly.

Rain fell from the sky above them. It did not start slow. A few droplets fell, and Zach saw maybe the fifth or sixth that reached his level was falling in between him and Ares. Ares leaned forward and swung his left arm down at his side, snapping his body forward to be horizontal and parallel to the ground like Zach's. Ares shot forward, and he and Zach swung blades that turned the falling raindrops to the sides. The wind that broke off from the clash of Zach's sword that he swung with both hands and Ares' that the God slashed only with his right, sped the rain out away from them in the wind that was made by their collision.

Zach leaned forward and his bared teeth ground as he pushed all of his force into Ares' blade. Ares leaned his own head forward closer to Zach's, his eyes serious but his expression showing that he was having fun despite it. Ares reached his left hand up over their crossing blades and gripped Zach by the neck in a sudden motion. Zach was growling out of his mouth angrily, so the loss of his breathing ability caused his whole body to flinch. Ares pushed his sword back into Zach's body and then flew by his left side, swiping up around the connecting point of Zach's left arm and his shoulder. His blade dug deep, but Zach's wings flapped up when he felt the loss of strength in his arms that made him look out for where Ares was going to slash him. Even the deep wound was only shallow as Zach pulled Death from his sword up into where Ares' blade was cutting through to turn it all into Death.

Then Zach spun around and he threw his smaller sword backwards towards where Ares spun to face him after slashing past. Ares smacked his sword into Zach's and parried it away, but Zach's sword spun around on its own with Zach lifting his left hand and curling all his fingers into a fist. That sword broke apart into five knives that raced at Ares and shot around his body in random by quick movements. Ares slashed at them back and forth faster than those blades themselves were moving. Zach had made his sword completely solid though, and the knives that blade had split apart into were just as strong and did not just get destroyed by the God's swings that Zach could see were weakened again.

Ares flew forward between two of the knives that shot down to his lower left and up over his left shoulder when he ducked it- Zach was already there. The gap was intentional despite looking like both were meant to keep him inside the cage of slicing knives spinning around him and getting close but not on piercing angles, only on ones that could graze. Zach's right hand reached for Ares' face, but Ares blew from his mouth and knocked Zach's hand back- only for a leaning back Zach to finish raising his left hand that had been pointed backwards so as not so show Ares the brightening blue light on his palm. He fired into Ares' chest- two of the black knives slammed into Ares' back as the God of War flew to his left. The blast of blue energy was aimed partially at Ares' left side and Ares knew that despite everything going on, Zach was probably thinking even farther ahead and wanted him to dodge to the right which was why he acted off-balanced and off-angled. It was why Ares dodged twice as fast to the side Zach aimed instead of pulling gentler away to the side easier to dodge on.

His predictions were wrong. Zach's black blades slammed into him, and Ares yelled out, "RAAA!" His body shrouded in a huge white aura that shredded the blades sticking into his back, and ripped apart the other three Zach still had too close to him. Ares flew after his enemy who just stabbed him like that with pure solid blades of Death.

I can't get hit out of this space! Zach flew right back at Ares, no more Death for weapons on him and only his wings on his back that were losing force and thus making him slower. He grit his teeth as he sped back towards Ares who just increased his own speed so much to fly at his opponent who had acted like the blow from his enemy had pushed him more off-balanced than he was. Zach flew in at Ares and swung his left fist, kicking up with his right leg. Ares stomped down on Zach's right thigh, raising his own left foot and dropping it on Zach's thigh as he was raising that leg. Crack!

Zach was grabbed by the left wrist at the same time, and more fingerprints dented into the steel as his angered enemy gripped it hard this time. Ares smirked angrily as he slammed his head forward and bashed it into Zach's forehead that he knew there was no protective Death behind. Zach's red eyes lost their glow and his mind got boggled- for less than a fraction of a second. His eyes snapped back open and turned bright red while his head was still leaning back with blood splashing from his forehead. He smirked right back at Ares, while finishing his right punch forward at Ares' chest where his enemy was so close to him having grabbed onto his left wrist.

A fist of black punched out of the end of Zach's knuckles. Ares had pulled his own body far enough back that Zach's punch would stop short of him, but the fist of darkness came out of nowhere and was stronger than Ares imagined possible. Zach was dropping though, and Ares realized it as he swung Zach by his left arm so that he would not have to let go in order to dodge this fist colliding with him but not yet absorbed into his body. His wings. Ares knew he was right in how much Death Zach still had with him, but when he got that close Zach's wings had sucked back into his body and coursed through his insides straight into his right hand that he started punching after his left and after his right leg was swinging up.

Zach felt his right femur was broken, but the smirk on his face only grew more as Ares swung him rather than let go as the God thought Zach would have wanted. Zach had plans for whether he got dropped or if Ares spun him like this though, because his left arm was able to turn in ways that normal arms could not. His wrist was grabbed, but his palm was able to turn around on his wrist and point up into Ares' face where it fired another blast of blue light that Ares snapped his head away from and let fly just past his left cheek. He was still in the middle of dodging that black fist that turned to follow him in the air, but his eyes darted up as Zach's whole dropping body suddenly yanked up in the air around his own shoulder like he was a contortionist dislocating his limb.

Zach flipped up like that and slammed down his right foot in a spinning kick, covering only the toe of his foot in the remaining Death he had inside after punching most out in that flying fist. Ares yanked down to throw Zach down at the planet below. Zach dislocated his arm for real this time. Ares wound up flinging a disconnected arm that Zach had spun around on and flipped up over as if to prove in the previous half second that he was forced to do so, that he was connected completely to it. Ares' swing was meant to throw Zach's kick completely off course and to put him falling down in front of where Ares' other fist was already swinging forward. His punch was going to hit nothing but air now, and he just threw a useless piece of metal out of the sky with no one connected to it.

The toe of Zach's right foot slammed down into the top of Ares' head, and then the fist of darkness that missed the first time sped up as half of it just exploded backwards to speed up the other half. It did not hit him with the full Death that the fist had in it, but without the burst of speed Zach doubted the fist would wind up putting any Death into his weakening opponent.

A hand gripped Zach by his right ankle and yanked down. Ares slammed his other fist into Zach's gut, then he brought the hand that yanked on Zach's ankle up to his throat and squeezed. He brought his left hand out to his side and grabbed Zach by his swinging right arm, right by his inner elbow which kept Zach from even bending his arm. The red glow faded from Zach's eyes as they opened back up from squinted when he was punched in the gut. Ares could have let him drop, but there was no point. His enemy who did not have wings nor any Death on him anymore, was just a one-armed boy with a broken leg and broken ribs and blood pouring down his face from the gash on his forehead.

Ares choked Zach with one hand while keeping that right hand far away from him using his other. He glared straight into Zach's eyes that looked right back and made a connection with his. Zach stared deep into his opponent's eyes, and Ares grinned as he could see hidden behind the strong resolve to not give up, a regret at the fact that he could not deny as hard as he pretended. "You, are beyond my expectations. You far exceeded what I had hoped the day we met would bring."

Ares was still choking Zach, but his hand loosened the smallest amount to just let Zach take in some breath, before he started choking the boy again. He gave Zach no permission to speak, and he stared into the eyes getting more and more bloodshot and soaked with blood as it poured down his face. Ares panted a few times as he strangled Zach again, but then he spoke to the figure he held up breathless and out of power. "Eziano downplayed your importance, until the end. His attacks failed because he truly believed himself to be 'chosen' and that you were not." Ares paused and panted twice more, then took in a deep breath and let it out calmly. Zach's face was red but turning paler underneath the blood, blue even as he suffocated in Ares' grasp. "He considered you no more than a pawn for so long. Too long, he would come to realize too late."

"At one point Eziano approved of your war around the world, but your war was going too well. You decreased the amount of soldiers for the other side and reversed the damage that was being done to the world order to descend it into chaos again. To power War. Not that I had asked him for any more power," Ares said that as if he were not involved in it, but Zach's bloodshot eyes with blood gathering on his bottom eyelids narrowed in unforgiving rage even as his head pounded and his vision was getting blurry. Ares relaxed his grip again which let Zach take in a massive breath, and he finished, "As I have long become omnipotent."

"That's not, how Quirks work," Zach snarled through gasps. His eyes that shut during that breath squinted back open with bloody tears coming out of them.

"How many powers have you obtained in such a short time?" Ares wondered to the child before him who he kept risen by the throat but was not choking anymore, as he had proven his ability to choke out and kill his opponent now. "How many powers do you train and master every month? Eziano was right about human potential. War makes me stronger. Powers me. But, I believe the powers I obtained could all just be advanced human techniques that would take hundreds of years to master for normal men. Then again, I really don't know. Maybe Longevity never was their Quirk…"

Ares mentioned "their" in reference to multiple people, and for a moment his expression saddened as he thought about that entire family line now gone. His eyes filled with a little more light as he refocused on the boy he held by the right elbow and the throat. "I don't know the origin of Quirks," Ares admitted. "I don't know if my own, so unique thousands of years ago, is truly the same as the Quirks of today. It is so much more powerful. So different in its fundamental existence, as a concept and not a thing… but then someone like you comes around. A God in the making."

"You're just a man, whose Quirk is powerful-"

"What do you think Gods are?" Ares wondered. "Do you need to be worshipped and praised? Have knowledge beyond that of humanity? Power like no other?" Ares chuckled while staring down his opponent he asked these things of. "Did you ever wonder if your increased power was extending your lifespan while making you stronger? I believe that the amount of wars in the first hundred years of my life were enough to power me for a thousand years. I stored power gained in that next millennia without dipping into it for a thousand years when I found myself low on the level I tried to keep myself at to feel more human… The power we have, is Godly. And you could be the God of Death."

"I won't be," Zach growled, no pauses in his voice this time. Blood splashed out of his lips as he spat that denial out.

Ares stared deeper into his eyes and replied in an ominous voice, "Do you think you have a choice?" Ares grinned at the look on his opponent's flinching face, and he started laughing and called out in a loud voice, "There's no point in denying me! I know you! You know how it feels!" Ares opened back up his eyes he closed there while laughing, and he looked into Zach's with a knowing gaze as he elaborated, "To know that even when you do good, that every act you commit is thanks to power you have from the deaths of millions? That without all that horror and bloodshed and violence you wouldn't have this strength? And every second having to live with it?!" Ares shouted that in a knowing voice with pain in it, but a shared pain he called out at his companion whose face was not reacting to these things. That did not dissuade Ares though, and he called out, "I know that you understand that, because it was a feeling I used to have and hated every second of when I still felt human! A feeling that drives you mad!"

Zach's face twisted and pulled back, his eyes unable to keep out the fear he was feeling at how deep these things Ares was calling out were. How deep inside him they resonated despite how he had never thought hard about them himself. He shook while pale and bloody and feeling the pain of his broken bones all over his body, but he tried to refocus and ignore his enemy who was distracting him… "Maybe, I have felt that before. And I do hate it," Zach admitted, his voice scratchy and hoarse. It felt like the inside of his throat was ripped and bleeding, and he could taste that blood in his mouth and felt it in his lungs. "Constantly feeling it… but I was at war, and I killed because I- I had to. You just killed because-"

"I didn't even know if I would consider what you were doing a war," Ares mentioned, excitedly as if glad he had someone he could talk to this about who did not treat him like a God. "I wondered if my Quirk was getting stronger because of you, and I couldn't tell, because you changed the game! You fought an ideal that the world didn't think was possible to defeat, one that I still don't believe you could realistically do, and yet you convinced powerful person after capable person of your ability to do it. And that was your most impressive power. Your comrades were amazing! The best soldiers I've ever seen," Ares admitted with an impressed shake of his head that made Zach's face scrunch up at the compliments towards his dead friends who Ares was in such a huge part responsible for killing.

"It's all thanks to you," Ares added. "Turning them into the perfect warriors, far better than Eziano's who always feared him to so much an extent that he could never tell which of them really believed in his goals and God. It was all just… mediocre, when I compare it to the kind of dedication your comrades had that I wouldn't even call fanaticism. For them to be that dedicated though without being fanatics," Ares shook his head back and forth, then he looked straight back into Zach's eyes that were glaring back but full of more emotion and reacting to everything he was saying. Ares grinned as they were able to talk like this, and he called out at his new companion, "They were normal people! Villains, heroes, vigilantes, and just random civilians! Gladiators and test subjects and fucking slaves! I commend you for turning them all into extensions of your weapon. Part of your military might. You utilized each person to their fullest and never tossed them aside which made them even more dedicated."

"And when you did toss them aside, you even convinced yourself you didn't so that none of the others would realize that you had." Zach's face distorted in rage, as thoughts he had never let himself fully have suddenly blasted to the surface and distracted him. Getting distracted made him freeze up, and he re-locked his eyes with Ares in more thoughtful and angry manner, but also a tone like he was going to shout something important back. There was no need to make the shift in the way he was looking though, but he did so too intentionally because it was reaction at this point to focus on the task at hand whenever he started thinking something like that. It was the only way to keep himself sane, keep himself from accepting some of those things that were still too hard to think about.

The fact that he was refocusing on listening to Ares and giving him that kind of look, made Ares turn his head left and right and look around them. "What have you been doing all this time?" Ares wondered to the boy he continued to hold by the neck, slightly tighter now but soft enough to still give Zach a chance to make some sounds to explain himself. "I could have killed you a dozen times over, and yet you're just keeping it all out there for what? Is it to keep your friend from interrupting us?" Ares glanced back at Zach with a confused look. His look was not serious at all but just curious and a bit annoyed that Zach was more distracted than he had thought during their conversation there. His annoyance grew as he thought to himself about how he was the one doing more of the talking, and that maybe Zach's reactions were even just part of some strategy rather than the two of them conversing as equals.

"I never tossed-" Zach started arguing, making Ares squeeze tighter and dart a glare back at him for the boy trying to keep the conversation going even though he clearly just looked around and saw the darkness on all sides of them. It was all still so far away from them, but there were no more gaps in those thin shreds of Death that were spinning and pushing into each other. It was still clearly a thin wall of Death, but Zach had pulled it from several hundreds of meters away from them to only a few hundred feet of a radius from where the two hovered up over the surface.

"You did," Ares countered. He glared back at the boy and revealed, "And you drove yourself mad so as to convince yourself and everyone else that you wouldn't do such a thing. Just to keep being the perfect commander and warrior that you needed to be."

"You... Fuck! Fine!" Zach sneered it out through a choked breath then wheezed inwards with the lack of breath he had, only for Ares to squeeze tighter as he continued to try yelling. Zach forced it out anyway, "But they- died with, pur-pose!"

"You tell yourself that to feel better. But I lost more men than you can imagine in battle. More men in more wars than you can count… Do you think I look back on some empires the world doesn't even remember, and think that those people I fought with died for something important? No. None of it ever mattered. It never matters." Ares said that as an absolute. This time, Zach did not get angered or saddened or distraught or confused by Ares' words.

He's wrong. Zach squinted open his eyes more and looked down his face at Ares in denial so strong it made Ares stop instead of repeating what he had just said so strongly. Maybe your wars of the past, were for reasons that you look back on and feel mean nothing in hindsight. Ours is not that kind of war. Zach's eyes opened more, stronger, and both of his fists clenched as he glared into Ares' cold gaze. "Are you getting concerned?" Zach asked in a raspy voice yet stronger now than it was before as he forced his words out in a single breath.

"I wonder why Deku hasn't flown up at us yet," Ares admitted at what Zach was calling him out on. There was some confusion he felt about his current surroundings. He added, "I admit your friend may give me some trouble at my current strength. That Midoriya Izuku seems like the kind of person who would have come and interrupted us to save his friend though."

I know that's why you stayed here longer even though I've been defeated already. Why even after noticing my long play, you just kept going on and on because you were glad I made those walls to keep Deku out. Because you wanted this time before you would have to now deal with Midoriya. Ares narrowed his eyes a little though he seemed more interested than concerned as he stared into the boy's eyes, "Why hasn't he come to save you yet? He had time before you moved those walls closer."

Zach grinned and choked while opening his mouth as Ares gave him a tiny squeeze to make sure he was not going to try lying. The right corner of Zach's lip curled up with blood trailing down it to his chin where it dripped off. He stared out through eyes that had blood all around them on his lids and running down the corners from his forehead to his cheeks. And he rasped out of his squeezed throat, "You think you know me, so well, but Midoriya knows me better."

Ares looked back around him and noticed the thin veil of Death was moving fast. Faster now, Ares realized, watching as it spun with more movement and each strand actually spinning around the sphere instead of just vibrating and moving back and forth in its area. Each individual piece of Death in the walls were moving far distances, sliding past each other and flying around and around. Ares' eyes shifted to his right and left, down and up, As thin as it is, how can he move it so quickly? With so much control? Ares could see each of those individual pieces was not just moving at random, and his eyes shifted back to stare right into Zach's eyes that were squinted but showed a look back in them that Zach had seemingly lost before.

"Your final move then?" Ares wondered at the sight of Zach's look indicating he thought this was still an ongoing fight. "I'll say it, we're in a sphere of Death. Rapidly spinning around us and getting closer each second."

Move it faster. Keep it thin. Don't let him break through until it's all set up. Keep him here. "You-"

Ares dropped Zach.

NOT YET!

Zach's eyes widened but narrowed immediately while Ares was turning to his left. The God of War flew in a slow way towards the curved wall of Death off on his left side that did not react to him getting closer except to move slightly farther away from him. Ares could see in his peripherals that all of the walls of the round containment of Death had moved with the slow-moving wall that adjusted as he flew towards it. He stopped twenty feet from the wall, and he brought up his palms with them pressed together in front of his chest. White aura surrounded Ares' hands, but his head turned and he darted his eyes back behind him with them growing wider.

An arm made of steel with no fake skin on it had flown through a spinning black wall behind Ares in the direction the God had been floating towards. His turning gaze narrowed angrily at the dented arm flying straight at him, and he moved apart his palms to reach his right hand out towards that approaching prosthetic he was going to destroy for good this time rather than just dropping. That fist flying his way suddenly opened up though before it reached him, and Ares' eyes shot wider as five long wires shot out of the arm even faster than it had been flying.

A weapon Ares has never seen before, Zach imagined while dropping below. I don't know how he spends all his time, but he was caught off guard by the functions of my arm before.

Ares reached up his arm he was going to block the fist with, and he slashed an open palm across the wires that had just wrapped around his face. Those broken wires fell and Ares glared to where he thought the arm would still be flying at him. His eyes darted down, and he pulled backwards but stopped and forced an aura out of his back as he was too close to the upper curve of the sphere that was repositioning on its own to try and keep him in the center. It continued to do that even as he flew closer to it intentionally to try and get Zach to pull some down to use it himself. However the boy flying up at him while gripping his left forearm with his right hand just screamed out with no Death around his body, "HHaaaaAAAH!"

Zach flew up dangling from his left arm that kept flying with a bright blue light coming out of its shoulder connecter jet. His own shoulder joint had bright glowing blue light coming off it as well, and Zach controlled his flying left arm to send him faster and up in front of Ares' body rather than straight at him. He then weakened the power of his arm while controlling the sphere around him with his mind to move it farther so they were centered in the middle, and with the sphere at a smaller version now than earlier it was easier to move it faster and all at once. The speed he had risen brought him to a stop as he reached the top of his arc, and he swung his left arm down with his right hand and threw it at Ares who swung his right arm across the front of his body to smash apart that arm-

Zach's prosthetic arm suddenly sped up again right before Ares' arm was going to cut through it, making Ares miss instead and the slash from his force to fly at the wall of the sphere forty five feet from him now at almost a radius of the sphere. Ares' eyes darted to his right side as the arm flew past him faster thanks to an increase in power from the shoulder joint, but he lost focus on the arm that changed directions below him. His eyes focused towards where his slash had just cut through part of the spinning sphere of Death. That wall had quickly closed back in because of how fast all the Death was moving on all sides of them. That was to be expected though. That was what Ares suspected Zach's intentions were with this last ditch attempt: that Zach had the Death moving so quickly so that even if Ares cut or punched a hole through it he would be able to fill it in quickly and still get Ares with some Death before he managed to fly all the way out.

Ares believed in his own speed and ability to get through in the split second he could open up the trap for. When he saw that opening though, his own heart raced faster. His eyes darted back to Zach as soon as the wall closed up, and Zach yanked Death from the spinning sphere above him down to his body again for more personal use now that Ares had clearly seen it. Even though a slice had been made splitting that thin inner spinning wall of Death, Ares had only seen black on the other side of it.

Zach wrapped his body up in Death again, and he pointed his arms forward and fired five small tendrils from each hand that shot at Ares and made him start dodging around in an ever-shrinking sphere of darkness. The sphere of Death around them shrank more, but Ares noticed as it did that it was not getting any thicker. Earlier it had gotten to a point where it fully surrounded them on all four sides, above, and below. Once it hit that point that it blocked them from seeing anything outside though, it stopped getting any thicker and just started moving faster. The fact that it was getting so much closer should have meant that the Death was condensing more too though, but now he realized where the majority of that Death had been going.

More Death from the inner sphere flew to Zach's back, but with the sphere shrinking as much as it did, Ares knew the creation of Zach's wings only took a portion of the Death that left their shrinking ball of confinement. Zach flew down where Ares was dodging some of his thin attacks, and Ares slammed his right fist down at the bottom of the sphere. He broke through it, only to see Death on the other side. His fist had covered in a white aura and he had slammed it so hard that it forced a funnel of wind down as it broke through the spinning black sphere. That spiraling wind kept the Death from immediately filling the hole, but Ares watched as the force of his punch dented down on the outer and thicker wall of Death slightly separated by the inner sphere with the small gap between.

The force of Ares' punch dented the bottom of the outer sphere out, but that outer wall was moving fast too. As the bubble bulged outwards on the enormous sphere of Death Midoriya was watching from the outside in sheer awe, the inside of the sphere regained form quicker than that bulge flattened back out. Ares shot around the inside of the sphere that still did not collapse in or pull any strands towards him that would weaken the inner walls before whatever Zach was leading up to. Ares punched and kicked as he flew around and around the inside of the sphere, but each time he tore through the spinning walls he saw thicker black walls around it that were moving faster now too despite having so much more Death than that inner containment that he had not been worried about because of how thin the combining wisps had been.

Even if he pulled it this close and kept it that thin, the outer version shouldn't be as thick as it is! Ares spun to Zach and growled, slamming his arms together in a crossed motion in front of his body that created an explosion of force too much for the smaller tendrils Zach still had chasing his opponent. It was not enough to do anything more than slow Zach for a moment himself though, as the boy now covered in armor around his joints and with strong wings sticking out of his back flapped them harder to accelerate at his enemy.

Zach punched his right arm and extended it out fully black ten feet but right past the side of Ares' head that his enemy yanked away still too fast for him. That arm broke apart and sped into the spinning Death around them that Ares could not see was actually looking thicker because although it was still thin on the inside, Zach was shrinking the gap between that inner sphere and the Death he had all around it. Ares kicked upwards and then extended that foot out in a jab with a beam of white shooting out of it and straight into Zach's chest where the boy shrouded it full of Death so thick that the beam ripped straight through and out his back without Zach slowing down.

Zach elbowed forward for Ares' face, and a splash of Death came out of the spinning wall behind them, and Ares had to fly up in the air to dodge rather than counter. He rose both hands and created two more spheres of white energy, grinding his teeth and then shouting in an impressed way, "It's really another full sphere around the inner one! How? How did you manage that?!" Ares threw one of the energy balls down that grew immensely in size in a moment.

He thinks it's all equally distributed now after those tests he did all around the trap. Now I can make it thicker in individual parts, but not where he threw that one. That's the distraction. The next is for where he's going to chase it out. Zach flew around the sphere of energy and then he spun and kicked his left leg fully shrouding in darkness into the second sphere that Ares threw at him instead of at one of the other walls like he expected. Zach kicked it as hard as he could while making his leg fully Death but also solid- Ares curled his right hand into a fist and made a white explosion of energy that Deku could hear outside of the spinning black spheres and coincided with a flinch in the spinning darkness.

A flinch was all that the blast made though, and Zach recreated his destroyed wings as he fell to the bottom of his spinning sphere that Ares was dropping down after him towards. The so-called God of War pulled back his legs that he was dropping for a double-kick into Zach's unprotected body, as the spinning wall below Zach rose up and connected with him. Ares darted his eyes up above expecting the ceiling to rise as well when the ground rose, but the sphere shrank faster now. His eyes shot to either side, while Zach righted his burnt body in the air down below with a deadly smirk covering his face.

The inner circle of Death was spinning so fast that it closed up any gaps made as Ares forced his aura out around him to test if any sides had weakened Death compared to the rest. "You can't get out of here, Ares!" Zach yelled up, his voice more victorious now and making Ares dart his eyes down and stare right back completely focused now and full of the intensity of a fight. It's too late! Zach thought then shouted, "This never could have worked! Not when I started it!" The sphere spun around faster and faster around them but stopped shrinking in for a moment. It just spun around wildly in all directions while Ares floated in the direct center of it, Zach standing on the bottom curve of the sphere with the darkness below him holding him up now and spinning up around his body as well while flooding him back full of its power.

"This trap started when you were far too strong for it to work," Zach snapped, his tone knowing and smug as he glared down his enemy just up above him. "It wouldn't work unless I managed to weaken you much more than the strength you were at when I started this attack several minutes ago. But I did weaken you. And I've gained much more control over my Death with the small amount I have left which is SO much easier to control than the vast depths of Limiter 0. I can control it because there's only this much to control at once!"

Shouting how it was "only" this much was amazing in itself, because "this much" was still an enormous amount of Death to be controlling individual strands of in such a coordinated effort. Ares had witnessed his enemy barely able to control all this power only thirty minutes ago, losing control of it and wasting so much as his huge bodies could not be fully utilized by a single mind. The fight had gone on long enough that both of their powers had weakened, and yet Zach shouted how that put him at the advantage and Ares could see this was no empty boast. His eyes darted all around, but Zach yelled at him, "It doesn't matter which direction you ultimately decide on! It's all equally distributed!"

Zach's eyes glowed red once again. His body fully covered in Death, and Zach growled, "Two massive spheres. One inner one that you can cut and try to fly out of, but a thicker and larger one behind it that you never saw coming. Because it's not just the Death from the inner sphere that pulled back and added to it, but the reserves that created the foundation of it the instant I created the inner wall! Before I even started shrinking it- as soon as it got close enough that you could not see outside it!"

"WHEN?!"

"THE SECOND I NOTICED YOU FIRST DODGE DEATH!" Zach roared, speaking on over half the fight ago. Much farther back than he even started coming up with this trap. His body was beaten and bloody and had broken bones inside. He had been fighting with no Death while using his remaining power for the start of this trap, and yet Ares heard this and realized that the "reserves" Zach had put aside were to be used only in his final and finishing move. That he had separated a chunk of himself back when he still had so much of Limiter 0 to use, meant that it was an unknown amount of Death inside that thicker wall outside that he had not seen gathering to judge how much was in it.

Even while the inner parts of the sphere had looked shaky and thin, even when Zach had been allowing his body to get broken while letting Ares believe that the trap was nothing more than the inner sphere he was surrounding them with, Zach had refrained from fully believing in this plan. If Ares had left- there's no point. He knew there was no purpose in considering the other options he had planned out in case this failed; in case Ares flew out of the trap and he had just allowed that much damage to be done to himself for no reason when he could have been using that Death to protect himself. There was no reason to even think about those contingencies now. They faded into the back of his mind while his teeth ground and the corners of his lips pulled back down and just apart with the rage shown in his bared teeth. The Death around him got thicker and hid his broken femur and ribs under the blacker Death.

Super move. Zach's breath sucked in and his left arm attached to his body out of nowhere. He rose up his arms at his sides, while Ares' body suddenly surrounded in bright white light with his own arms rising and glowing with bright auras of white energy. That energy started to glow blue, but Zach pulled his arms faster than he was going to let Ares charge anything. "Death Trap: IMPLOSION!" The Death below him flooded up his sides and made him vanish inside an ocean of fast-moving Death all condensing in on a single point.

Up through the Death waves all pulling towards a single point, a sword shot across the sky and sliced through the outer wall. It cut through fast, but that wall was so thick already that while pulling in, it filled the space of the split before the hilt connected with Ares' right hand inside the condensing Death that slammed into his aura-shrouded body. Death pounded Ares from all sides, and the multi-thousand year old God rose his sword up over his head while his aura raged around him like a flame. "RRAAAAA!" Ares slammed his sword down and he cut a hole through the Death ahead of him.

Ares shot forward, and all of the Death flew after him and filled in that hole. It battered him from all sides into his white aura, but he saw the other side of the hole even if that was filling in faster than the rest of the tunnel. He just slashed his sword forward again and cut through it, only for a pair of black arms to reach up when he was just about to fly out of that hole. Zach grabbed Ares by the legs right through the man's white hot aura, and he gripped his hands in tightly as Ares let out a scream. Ares spun his body while keeping up his momentum.

Midoriya was scanning his eyes back and forth rapidly across the sky where all that Death just convened and was imploding and then bursting back out all over as it could not be condensed any more than it was. His eyes shot across the broken sphere to the left though, as a hole ripped through it and Ares came flying out, slashing his sword down and cutting off Zach's arms that had him gripped by the legs. The slash was so strong it tore those arms completely into black shreds, and Zach's real arms came pulsing out of his shoulders as a trail of Death followed him like a flare coming from the wild Death Sun behind him. All that power pulled after Zach as fast as he and Ares were moving, making a cone of darkness that spun after them and pulled directly into Zach's back.

Zach slashed his right arm up with a black sword in it that Ares parried, then another all-black Zach leaned up out of Zach's upper back with two more swords gripped in his hands he was slashing down. Two other Zachs came out of the one that rose up out of Zach's back, with another pulsing out of the one that ripped to the left only looking less human and more demonic as those bodies had been turning each time they separated. Ares swung his arms fast but slower than ever before. He sliced through black swords or parried them away if they were harder, and he punched his left fist forward that took most of his aura with him and blew a hole straight through the connecting point of Zach's back and the rest of his bodies ripping out of him.

All that aura that Ares brought to his left hand at once exploded after flying through Zach's upper back-neck. It exploded in the connection point between all the Death remaining that Zach had imploded on them, and Zach himself who was blown forward by the explosion but slashed two swords across the front of his body using all the Death from his breaking extra forms. Those bodies turned into the two black swords Zach needed to parry Ares' sword backwards this time, stronger than Ares was swinging unlike all the other times right there when Ares had been overpowering Zach's swings.

Zach parried Ares back then dropped the swords and punched forward faster than he would have been able to swing again and catch Ares while his arms were moved from a guard position. Ares could have been able to move fast enough to get his sword back in time to block or parry or redirect Zach's next sword attacks, but Zach's black blades just hovered in midair as Zach slammed both fists down onto Ares' shoulders and dropped his enemy out of the air with his punches.

Then the rest of the Death from behind that last explosion shot through the smoke and hit Zach in the back with the biggest boost of all time. He flew out of the air far faster than he had just sent Ares dropping. Ares slashed his sword up with his right hand. His left hand grabbed the hilt too at how hard he saw Zach swinging down both swords he had gripped again as soon as he finished punching downwards, right as that explosion of Death was hitting him in the back. Zach swung the left sword down faster though and hit Ares' blade with the same speed Ares was swinging up at him, then he passed by the collision point of their crossing blades and caught Ares on the left side of his chest using the black sword in his right hand.

As he was cutting there though, Zach flooded all the excess Death he had for protection and aura and wings and whatever absorbed into him as the explosion hit his back, straight into the sword in his left hand that had collided with Ares' blade. Ares thought the sword cutting into him in Zach's right hand would be the one all this excess power moved to, but Zach put it all into the left blade that Ares was just trying to push past to knock away the right sword before Zach could fill it with power. It was a fatal mistake he realized the moment the sword he tried to push past suddenly shot the other way so much harder than he was expecting or able to withstand. Zach knocked his sword out of his hands while also knocking both his arms to the side and completely opening up his chest and stomach and face and neck.

He was completely undefended. Unguarded. Zach's slash with his right sword that had already cut through skin in a shallow way had finished and the one he slashed with his left was done as well. Both of his swords lifted up while Ares' arms were being pushed away and his body twisting. Zach's legs dropped down below him faster though and wrapped around Ares' waist with the bottoms of his legs transforming into claws that gripped the God's hips. He kept Ares from spinning so that his front was still facing upwards as they shot out of the air ever closer to the ground. Zach rose up both of his swords with no Death on the rest of his body other than his claw legs and on the hands gripping his flaring swords so powerful and strong and distributed evenly now as the blades passed Death between them when Zach rose them and crossed them like that.

Ares leaned his head up and let out a roar, "RROOOAAA!"

"RRRAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Zach screamed right back down as he leaned his head down towards Ares' face and as he slashed both of his swords down insanely fast across Ares' upper body. Blood splashed out of Ares as an X was carved through him. The swords were hard enough in their core to cut through his diamond strong skin, but there was enough flaring darkness around them that it flooded into the gashes as they were made and right into Ares' bloodstream as the two of them slammed into the ground.

Midoriya stood frozen in place as the ground shook below him again. He stared towards where all the dust and smoke and Death blew up around the two who slammed into the ground. His feet started moving that way. He was losing. I was going to step in, but I saw that Death that snaked by me. He was controlling it. Midoriya's heart pounded and he was breathing heavy as he jogged towards that smoke, and he slowed down as he stared into it at the one silhouette standing over the other imbedded into the ground.

"Stay out of this… Get the fuck out of my way. You don't stand a chance." Midoriya was reminded of those words as Zach's face became clearer in the fading smoke around where they had smashed down. The sky above them thundered and cracked, the clouds shaking and swirling around fastest right above them now. There were fissures all over the ground in the part of the range they were in. Chunks of mountains lay scattered around them in pieces of all sizes. Dead trees completely blackened lay uprooted underneath ten thousand ton boulders. The sky flashed with light from a bolt of lightning that shot across the sky and branched out as it flew down and struck a mountain in eight different places. Despite that light, everything in front of Midoriya was tinted black by the swirling darkness that hovered above Zach's body and at the top of his right hand that was risen above him.

Zach's feet were on either side of the man he stood over. He was panting heavily and glaring down as he wheezed in and out, his legs wobbly and filling him with the worst agony as he put weight on a broken femur. He stayed standing though. His skin was pale as blood dripped off his chin and down his nearly bare body. Zach stood with his body covered in lines of red and black, hunched forward and seeming larger despite not having that much Death around it. He seemed to grow even more while he held up the massive sword in his right hand, that he flipped around and ripped all the darkness out of the air to pull solely into that blade.

The sky all around the sword blackened. The tint spread in all directions and despite there not actually being Death surrounding Midoriya, he felt dark at the color that just shrouded them. The ground around Zach's feet started turning black, and it became less solid as bubbles of darkness boiled all over the land out from where Zach was standing but out from around Ares' body rather than towards him. Ares coughed and squinted open his eyes for the first time after smashing into the ground and creating the crater below him that so many cracks had broken off from.

"I can't, believe I was, defeated," Ares opened his eyes a little more and stared up into the dark red ones looking down at him. Swirls of pitch blackness spun around in those red orbs, as Zach's body seemed to grow even more with his face twisting in a demonic way. Black lines cut across his face line veins and pulled off the edges and back behind his head, flaring over him with his hair that waved around looking like Death itself. Wind blew around Zach's body and his aura flared while his sword gave off a feeling of pure death. "For the first time, in all of history," Ares could feel it down in the X-shaped gashes crossing his chest that so much Death had absorbed directly into.

"You truly are a God-" Ares started up.

"I am not the God of Death!" Zach screamed out, raising his left hand up to the hilt he held over himself too. The weapon shook in his hands and his legs vibrated harder as the ground all around him seared and bubbled with Death. "Just as you are not-"

"If you strike me down, you will be ALONE!" Ares roared up at the boy holding that sword up higher over him. "One day you will find yourself, the only one left in this world!" Ares yelled, panting as he made it out and leaned his head up to call it at the teenager glaring in such murderous rage down at him. "You and I, we could be-"

"YOU, are a MONSTER!" Zach bellowed, his voice rippling out and causing shifts in the wind around him. The mountains seemed to tremble beneath his voice, as he roared that out in the most hate Midoriya had ever heard anyone scream in.

"Zach," Midoriya whispered. His feet picked back up again, What am I doing?! "Zach!" Midoriya screamed out, running towards his friend who was holding that sword of Death over his defeated enemy.

Zach's teeth slammed together at the faint sound of his name shouted in the background. His eyes did not leave the man down below whose head lowered back down to the ground as he saw that look in Zach's gaze. Ares coughed a few more times, and then his lips curled up into a regretful and even pitying smile. He looked up at Zach as the boy held up a black sword full of all his power, a sword that was changing the environment around them from how condensed the Death inside it was. A blade more powerful than Ares had ever seen before. Zach rose up that blade the highest he could get it, his teeth grinding back and forth as all the wind around him slammed into his face and pushed the Death even harder back behind him.

"You may not yet accept that you are the God of Death," Ares started, his voice raising in volume as Zach's hands gripped tightly around the blade and made Death flare off it so hard that Midoriya stumbled while running forward at the shake of the world around them. Ares leaned his body up though as Zach started screaming out, and he declared in a yell, "But you kill me now, and you ARE the GOD OF WAR! HAAAA…"

Zach did not care. Maybe it was a trick because Ares thought that he did not want to become a God so it would keep him alive. Maybe it was just one final taunt. Whatever it was, he did not know. He did not care. Zach tilted his head back and rose his sword in a swift motion up, and Midoriya sped up rushing in, yelling out, "ZACH! STOP!"

Zach brought down his blade though. "You are NO God! NOW DIE! AREEESSSS! RRaaaAAAAAAHHH…"

Zach slammed the sword through Ares' chest, piercing his heart and the ground below him. Ares whole body jolted and his screamed grew louder, "HAAAAAAAA…" He was a screamer, and his head leaned upwards higher as Zach impaled him, as he smiled while letting out the loudest scream of pain or just a yell into Zach's face. He survived more Death than anyone ever had, but injected directly into his heart with that much…

The ground below broke apart when Zach's blade slammed through underneath Ares' body. Midoriya stumbled and fell to his right knee, his eyes widening in horror as he stared only ten meters ahead of him. All of the darkness and Death around them pulled into a single point and shot right into Ares' body. Then came the shockwave out from Ares' form as he roared out in pain, his power erupting out and making the ground that had just cracked so much worse from the already separate explosions and shocks lift up and drop down at different elevations. Then all the shifting ground stopped moving as the pulse of energy that just pushed Midoriya's body back on one knee and forced him to cross his arms, pulled back the other direction towards a man who just fell silent.

The sky stopped moving. The clouds stopped swirling and two bolts of lightning froze in midair. The silence was shattering. Midoriya had been pushed back by the shockwave, but the pull forward of all that force had literally yanked him back to his feet and made him stumble closer to Zach. He froze like everything else though as all that Death and all that power pulled directly into Ares' body. Zach's body had shrank down and even the sword he was still gripping was barely a fraction of what it was before, a shimmering dark sliver that got hazy and broke apart as the atmosphere around Ares' unmoving body became unstable.

Zach was staring straight down at Ares' face whose mouth that stayed open had no noise coming out anymore. His eyes were rolled back and not a sound escaped him in the deafening silence around them. All that pulse of energy pulled back into Ares' body, and Zach could feel what was at the bottom of his sword now that Ares' heart had stopped. All the Death plunged down started pulling backwards into that sword. Zach turned his head slowly to the left as Midoriya scrambled to steady himself and then backpedaled fast at that look in Zach's eyes. "Run," Zach's single word of warning came right as the eruption of power exploded from Ares body and all the Death shot up the sword Zach had piercing through him.

The explosion shredded the stone below them at nearly a molecular level. The rocks turned to pebbles turned to dust, as Midoriya's legs bent and he jumped back the other way with his arms raising up to protect from the blast of force that came out of Ares as he died. He landed and stumbled backwards, busy punching his fists forward rapidly and destroying the huge chunks of rock that tore out of the ground ahead of him and flew at him fast enough that they were tearing long trenches through the ground. That ground was breaking apart more and flying out in all directions around Zach and Ares, and the force from the God's death broke the ground deeper and deeper, sending a force of a bomb blowing out in all directions.

Midoriya could not keep up with all the rocks and smaller debris that were flying at him, blinding him as those small dust particles got in his eyes. He crossed his arms in front of him and planted his feet down to try and keep from getting thrown by the force, but it still made him skid backwards through the floor dragging up a trench far far back with even more rocks being dragged up by his heels that he dug in harder. He did not feel any more huge rocks slamming into him, only a few smaller ones and pebbles that his body managed to take without them breaking through his skin, but it was the force of the explosion itself that hit him with the brunt and made him gasp out at a loss of breath.

There was barely any heat in the blast, but it was still one of the strongest explosions Midoriya had ever felt in his life, and he was childhood friends with Bakugo Katsuki. The explosion passed him though. It flew by and Midoriya brought his right arm in front of his eyes, wincing as there was still a gash on his upper arm there but using the arm to shield his eyes as he started to open them. He needed to be careful, and he had to rub his eyes and blink over and over. They were watering and that tearing up of his eyes pushed out the dust particulate that had gotten in them. His eyes still stung and his vision was blurry, but it gradually cleared as he lowered his arm and stared through settling dust towards where he saw a dark shadow hunched forward with several long black wisps seeping off of him.

The rumbling of the ground stopped, but Deku watched as that dark form pulsed and pulsed with the pitch black aura that surrounded it. Midoriya lowered his arms more and stood back up straight with his eyes shaking as he panted over and over. He stared ahead towards the shadow in the smoke. A wheezing shadow wisping with dark tendrils that moved higher up in the air to snake up to ten meters above him. A dark form that started turning its head in Midoriya's way, looked him in the eyes with pitch black ones of its own…

And smiled.

---

A/N WOMMM WOMMM XD Thanks for reading guys. Crazy long chapter, one of the longest I've ever written (again). Zach vs Ares ends with a massive bang, but what comes now? ... Find out next time! Anyway, onto a more serious note. I was able to reread this chapter, edit, and post today because I've decided to stop going to work. Just stocked up and am going to isolate myself for now on. To anyone living in areas near people already suspected or confirmed of contracting the coronavirus, be careful. Pharmacies near me are already sold out of surgical masks, had to drive 30 mins just to get a couple boxes. I'm stocking up on supplies and food and maybe I am just overreacting, but if a week from now people I was dealing with at work (and I have to meet and interact with hundreds on a daily basis), start showing symptoms, then I'll have been exposed to the virus during the incubation period where it's still contagious. On the positive side, hopefully that means I can start writing faster again and uploading with more speed than these once a week updates I've slowed down to recently (though the length of these chapters has been a factor to that). Also, RIP Kobe and the others in that chopper crash today. RIP those who the virus has gotten already. Hope y'all aren't bugging out as much as I have been. And just stay safe guys. Back to our imaginary world (more fun to escape to), I do hope you enjoyed the chapter! Leave a review below telling me what you think, comments, questions, and predictions for what is to come now... And review responses:

papaprep chapter 213 . Jan 15

eziano is a mystical supernatural untouchable super-assassin... ahahahhaha

XD Glad you liked that line, and the plot twist at the end there! Hope you enjoyed the new chapter and thanks for reviewing!

AMR-MNR chapter 213 . Jan 14

Well shit. I guess a new cataclysm has come up on the horizon! The god of War and the god of Death come together for a faithful brawl, yet who will win?! It's a fight that will go down in history!
. . . Literally. Zach being taller than the clouds and expunging this much death in such a battle will bring the world's eye upon them. And seeing the power of these two individuals, as well as the possible presence of other such immortals, the people of earth may just question their own existence.

The God of Death takes it, though now Ares has declared him the God of War too right at the end... As for bringing the world's eye to them, a few of you guys mentioned thinking this was going to happen. We don't know what'll happen yet with that, but I set up the Muindo Mountains last chapter as an explanation for why this fight was not going to be interrupted, and even with that establishing setting we still had Wonder Man thinking about rushing in... until mountains were literally destroyed in front of him. XD Thanks for the review, and hope you liked the battle!

Super Power Sensei chapter 213 . Jan 17

WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK! WHAAAAAAT! THE! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME AUTHOR-SAMA!? ARE YOU JUST TROLLING AGAIN?! WHAT IS HAPPENING!? WHY IS HAPPENING!? IS THIS AN ILLUSION!? DREAM!? HOW COULD SOMEONE LIKE THIS EXIST?!
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH-[CONTINUES TO GO NUTS AT 3a.m.][Calms down eventually]

As always, thanks for the long review! Glad you got super hyped by the last chapter and hope this lived up to it! XD The job was going pretty good, btw, until today. Woke up to more cases in the US and was just like... "Nah. Done with going outside and interacting with people. Much better to finally edit and post that chapter." :P so yeah, you wrote a lot of stuff in that review that Ares talks a lot about during this chapter where he meets his long awaited companion... who doesn't feel the same kind of way about him. Eziano resisting Death too, it's always been shown that the stronger characters are more resistant to it, but Ares took that to a whole other level this chapter. In the end, Death worked on him as well though. Anyway, thanks again for reviewing, and hope you enjoyed the battle!

Anon chapter 213 . Jan 15

I'll bet my left pinky toe that Raijin is the lightning god.

Couple of you mentioned this as well, just wanted to remind you guys that in the chapter where Kaminari betrays them (86), he says that on his way out. Tells them they can call him by that name: Raijin, after the God of Lightning. Thanks for the reviews guys! Hope y'all enjoyed the chapter. And I've already gotten started on work on the next one, so hopefully I get that out before next weekend!