Time fractured.

Max stood in the centre of the Grimm Institute's broken heart, and the world crawled around him. Sounds moved like molasses. Light refracted strangely. Gold twisted in the corners of his vision like it was trying to escape his presence. Even his own heartbeat slowed to a monumental, oceanic thud.

Boom.

He took a step forward. The tile beneath him melted before contact, gold turning to slag, soulsteel curling into ash. His foot didn't land. It declared. Every molecule of air recoiled, every shadow snapped toward him like pulled by gravity reversed.

The fire didn't burn anymore.

It consumed.

It bent.

It rewrote.

A wave of pale blue hellfire – Aamon's legacy, his inheritance, his evolution – rippled outward from Max's body. It didn't just radiate heat. It inverted it. The fire was cold. Icy at its edges, with a heat so pure it annihilated the concept of temperature.

He saw everything.

Every injury in perfect, surgical focus.

Chloe, collapsed in a crater of shattered spears, her shoulder dislocated, blood matting her hair.

Dan, slumped with one arm half-gilded, his golden eye flickering in pain.

Victor – his ribs cracked open like an old mausoleum, but still braced against a fallen beam, one claw twitching.

Alyssa, silent beneath gold wreckage, her gauntlets still clenched, her body buried, but not bowed.

Each of them had stood their ground.

For Liz.

And there – centre of it all – her containment pod. Cracked. Bleeding red glyphs. Humming with failing wards. A single flicker of crimson aura glowed faintly within.

She was still in there.

Still alive.

Still fighting.

Max's fire flared brighter, casting the chamber in blue eclipse. The world vibrated like it might collapse beneath the weight of him.

Then Mammon stirred.

He stood, robes torn down the centre, mask cracked along the cheekbone, golden blood staining his palms like melted jewellery. His spine arched as if pulled by invisible strings of power, his body struggling to reassemble dignity from wreckage.

And then he raised his hands.

The ceiling vanished in silence.

Above them, the void swirled – a vortex of contracts, debts, calculations. Gold paper spiralled from nowhere, forged into a descending apocalypse. Tens of thousands of golden spears emerged from the dark – spinning, gleaming, aimed at the blue flame below.

Each one carried a name.

Each one was a soul bought, bound, weaponized.

Mammon's voice came like a judge's ruling:

"You were never part of the system."

Then he dropped his hands.

The spears fell.

A storm of divine execution.

Max didn't flinch.

He took one more step forward.

And the fire answered.

The first spears vaporized on contact – molten midair, collapsing into slag and concept. The second wave twisted in their descent – deflected by the gravity of the fire, like even debt itself refused to touch him.

Then came the real storm.

Blades faster than thought, sharper than history, forged in belief and bound to doctrine.

Max raised his arm.

A wall of blue erupted around him – not a shield. A furnace. A judgment.

The spears melted before they came close.

He kept walking.

One by one, the spears turned to vapor. Golden light dimmed. The blade storm faltered, slowed.

Mammon's hands trembled.

Max finally spoke.

Not loud. Not shouted.

Just true.

"I've seen what she suffered. You and your kind— don't get to exist anymore."

Silence followed.

And then Mammon extended one arm.

Not conjuring.

Summoning.

From the air unravelled a ledger-blade – a golden sword etched with infernal contracts, each clause glowing like a brand. It shimmered with the weight of trillions of promises, each soul-bonded line of ink now a weapon.

A blade forged from suffering.

Mammon took a stance – not elegant. Efficient. Perfect. Fatal.

Max's fire burned hotter in reply.

The chamber cracked.

The duel began.

…………………

The room trembled with pressure that had no source.

Mammon raised the ledger-blade, and the world obeyed.

The weapon wasn't forged in steel or fire but in contracts. In every soul signed away. In every deal struck under duress. Its hilt shimmered with glyphs, its blade whispered in languages that predated sin. Each stroke it made bled logic and law, severing possibility from the present.

He moved.

Faster than thought.

A blink – then he was in front of Max, blade carving a golden arc that ripped through stone, air, time.

The Grimm Institute's reinforced vault wall split with the motion. Not shattered. Unwritten.

The attack wasn't just physical. It erased potential futures.

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Max didn't dodge.

Didn't block.

He stepped through.

The edge grazed him – just missed his chest by inches. But as the blade passed, it met the gauntlets of fire now wrapping his fists.

Not armour.

Condemnation.

He struck.

The air boomed as Max's first punch landed against Mammon's shoulder. Not enough to break him but enough to interrupt.

Mammon reeled, robes flaring, eyes narrowing.

Max pressed forward.

No elegance. No style.

Just wrath made form.

Each punch detonated like a bomb – his hellfire fists hammering into Mammon with the sound of tectonic plates grinding together. Sparks. Cracks. Aftershocks.

Mammon countered – blade flicking between stances, every move optimized, mathematical. Where Max fought like a storm, Mammon struck like a ledger closing.

Their duel wasn't choreography.

It was collision.

A punch deflected into a spinning blade-parry. A downward chop that shattered stone, met with a fist that ignited air.

The Institute's floor fractured. Beams screamed. Lights died.

Mammon's voice cut through the noise – calm, sharp, a balance sheet spoken aloud:

"All things must be owned."

Another swing – an arc of gold fire.

"All fire fades."

A thrust aimed at Max's throat, bending reality around it.

"Even your rage will be budgeted."

Max blocked the stab – barehanded. Flame spiralled up his forearm, eating the blow. His jaw clenched. His pupils narrowed to slits of blue.

Still, he didn't answer.

Another swing. This one nearly took his arm.

Mammon pressed harder – momentum shifting. Every movement was a transaction. Every step a tax.

Until—

Max whispered.

A single line, like a tombstone etched in fire.

"I'm not fire."

He caught the blade.

Mid-swing.

"I'm what comes after."

The ledger-blade sank into Max's palm, contracts searing into his skin, words of ownership trying to brand themselves into his soul.

Max didn't scream.

He stared.

And then, with a grunt that sounded like the end of prophecy—

He snapped it in half.

The contracts wailed.

The blade shattered.

Mammon staggered.

For the first time—

Off-balance.

…………………

The world was breaking.

Chloe lay half-buried beneath a fallen support beam, her lungs filling with air that scorched her throat. Her cheek was split. Her limbs barely obeyed. But her eyes – blurred with sweat, blood, and heat – stayed locked on one thing:

Max.

Or what was left of him.

He stood in the centre of a storm made entirely of fire. Not orange. Not red. But deep, impossible blue – the colour of heat that came after the world ended.

And Mammon – Mammon had flinched.

His golden blade lay in pieces, still smoking, still whispering its last unfulfilled contracts. The collector of debts had staggered, robes torn, mask cracked wider down one cheek. He looked smaller now. Less perfect.

Less untouchable.

Chloe wanted to laugh.

But the air was too thick to breathe.

Behind her, Dan knelt with one arm around Alyssa – who was trying to rise – and his other hand flared with a golden aura stretched into a dome of protection. It was shrinking. Fast.

Dan's voice rasped behind her, barely audible. "I can't hold this much longer…"

The heat pressed in from every direction. Not just fire – pressure. The kind that warps metal and bleeds light from stone.

Max wasn't just burning.

He was breaking the environment.

Everything cracked. Walls warped. Pipes screamed. The remaining vault supports bent inward like the room itself was bowing.

Chloe forced herself upright, half-phasing to move. She leaned on Tensō like a crutch.

She stared at Max again.

And realization struck her like a slap:

He wasn't becoming a demon.

He wasn't even transforming.

Max Jaeger was ceasing to be a man.

His edges shimmered. His hair was fire now. His limbs bent wrong in flickers. He pulsed – not with light, but with intent. His face contorted and smoothed in rapid succession. Eyes of pure blue. No whites. No pupils. Just will behind flame.

Chloe staggered forward.

"MAX!" she screamed.

No response.

"You're going to kill us all!"

Still – he didn't stop.

Didn't turn.

The ground beneath her warped. Her boots began to sizzle. Her skin felt like it was cracking from the inside.

Dan rose, golden aura guttering.

He pushed forward – blood at his mouth, his crystallized eye twitching.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted—louder than he ever had:

"DON'T LOSE YOURSELF!"

Max turned.

But it wasn't Max anymore.

His face was lit from within.

His eyes were blue galaxies. Infinite. Empty.

There was no recognition.

No mercy.

Only the fire.

And it was watching them.

…………………

Max didn't move through the air – he erased it.

Blue Hellfire surged behind every step, swallowing oxygen, bending space. His hands were fists of collapsing stars. His body bled fire instead of blood. There was no battle cry. No scream. Just velocity.

And then—

Impact.

He barrelled into Mammon with all the force of a planet out of orbit. The collision blew a crater through the Institute's deepest vault layer – then the next. Then the next.

Five walls of soulsteel shattered, each thicker than a tank's hull. Blue fire licked the edges of every hole, liquefying gold as they plunged into the earth like a meteor made of memory and vengeance.

Max did not stop.

They tore through sublevel after sublevel – soulsteel groaning, melting, disintegrating beneath their passage.

And then—

The sixth level gave way.

They crashed into what had once been Ferron's forge – now twisted, broken, a charred skeleton of blackened chains and collapsed runes. Half-melted weapons littered the ground. The air reeked of scorched iron and shattered intent. The remnants of The Mirror's shattered prison flickered faintly in the corners – soulglass and reflection shards catching the light like the fragments of a bad memory.

Furnaces once used to bind demons still glowed faintly but their fire shrank before Max's. Ancient worktables exploded. The ritual circle at the forge's heart, where containment seals had been carved by Ferron's hand, cracked under their weight – glowing briefly, then vanishing entirely in a pulse of ash.

Mammon hit the obsidian floor like a god being cast out.

Max followed him down like a judgment.

Fists blurred.

One. Two. Six. Thirteen. Twenty.

Each strike detonated with a sound like a contract being voided. Fire didn't just burn flesh – it burned concepts. Value. Credit. Influence. Max's fists weren't destroying Mammon's body—they were incinerating the very system he represented.

Gold turned to smoke beneath his blows.

Mammon's screams were not human.

Not demonic.

Not pain.

Panic.

"No – no – this wasn't in the calculation—"

His robe frayed into dust.

The ancient mask of his face cracked apart, lines of gilded ink bleeding from its seams. The soul-symbols engraved on his ribs peeled away, atomized by every punch.

And still, Max hit.

Until Mammon stopped being beautiful.

Until he was nothing but a shattered thing beneath a god's wrath.

Then something shifted.

A sound.

A heartbeat.

Not Max's.

Mammon's voice – wet, rattling – broke through the fire:

"Dividends accrued."

And he began to rise.

Not whole.

Rebalancing.

The scorched flesh on his chest shimmered gold again. His mask reknit itself in floating threads of currency. The cracks in his limbs filled not with bone but with value. Stocks. Souls. Contracts sealed in blood.

The more Max burned him…

The more powerful – the richer – he became.

The Hellfire began to flicker.

Max's aura stuttered.

The blue dimmed at the edges.

Mammon smiled again – gleaming, godly, golden.

"Everything has cost," he whispered, rising. "Even fire."

Max staggered back, breath rattling.

His fists trembled.

And then—

Max whispered.

Soft.

Cold.

Final.

"Then let me burn everything."

He raised his arms.

And summoned more.

The fire answered.

A ring of cobalt flared open around him, pulsing like a heart made of extinction. The ground turned black. The ceiling hissed.

And Max—

stepped into the inferno.

…………………

The Grimm Institute shuddered.

Not from structural damage, not from explosive runes or magical collapse but from something deeper. Something older. Something wrong.

The soulfield groaned beneath it. The containment wards wept light. Every level pulsed once – then fractured.

Reality buckled.

From the deepest chamber, where fire had once been shackled, Max became something else.

He was no longer a man.

No longer a Contractor.

Not even a vessel.

He was a singularity of Hellfire and grief, compressed into the shape of fury.

Blue flame – no longer fire, but pure consequence – curled upward from his back in writhing tendrils. His arms crackled with soul-scars and ancient sigils. His breath no longer steamed – it boiled the light.

And in front of him, crawling up from melted stone and broken gold, Mammon rose – patched by dividends, reconstructed by debt.

"I own her," Mammon rasped, jaw flickering with molten cracks. "I set her value."

Max moved.

The air inverted.

Time staggered.

And the floor disintegrated beneath him as he launched.

He hit Mammon like a comet of wrath, a meteor punched into existence by paternal fury and apocalyptic hate. The impact didn't just hurt – it rewrote.

Mammon was punched upward.

Through the ceiling of the forge.

Through the containment vaults above.

Through the archives of infernal law and contract history – each one shattering as they passed, scrolls bursting into ash, ledgers igniting like gasoline-soaked lies.

Each level they crossed witnessed judgment.

Golden chains cracked.

Sigils bled light.

Souls once bartered screamed as their prisons ruptured.

The tower's central column lit up from within – blue inferno ripping skyward.

Down below, Victor gasped, eyes wide, blood leaking from his nose. He squinted through the fire and saw nothing but light.

A voice roared, not from Max's mouth, but from the soul itself – louder than thunder, more furious than flame:

"You don't get to name her worth."

Chloe flinched at the sound. Dan pressed his cracked fingers to his ears. Alyssa blinked once – then wept, without knowing why.

The fire receded into a howl.

And then—

The surface exploded.

In the ruins of the Grimm Estate – the manor that had once masked the Institute from the world – a pillar of blue flame erupted through stone, ash, and sky, obliterating the illusion of legacy.

The heavens ignited. The trees bent. Birds disintegrated mid-flight.

Max and Mammon vanished into the heart of that godlight, swallowed by wrath, by ruin, by hell itself.

They were gone.

Silence fell.

Then – collapse.

The ceiling of the lower levels groaned – then gave way. Steel beams cracked like bone. Soulglass shattered into mirrors of war.

The last lights dimmed.

In the darkness, the only glow came from the pod – still sealed.

Still red.

It pulsed once.

Then again.

Then softly—

Faded.

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