Shadow Monarch in DC

Igris lowered his blade for a single moment, and inclined his head in a slow, formal bow the kind reserved for enemies he respected enough to kill properly.

"May the worthier warrior prevail."

Doom did not bow back, he simply rolled his massive shoulders once, the sound like tectonic plates grinding past each other, and the bone ridges along his brow lowered a fraction, the only acknowledgment he seemed capable of giving.

Then the shadow bell fell silent,

Doom moved first.

There was no wind-up, no telegraph, nothing a lesser warrior could have read and countered, one instant he stood motionless at the center of the arena floor, the next his fist was already arriving, a boulder of shadow muscle and bone hurtling forward with enough force behind it to end the fight in a single connection.

Igris wasn’t there.

He’d read the shift in Doom’s weight a fraction of a second before the punch ever left its origin, and his body had already answered, sliding low and to the left in a single fluid motion, the demon king’s sword trailing sparks of crackling lightning as it passed a hair’s breadth from Doom’s ribs on the way by not a killing cut, just a testing one, a line drawn to see what kind of hide he was working with.

The blade scored a shallow gash. Lightning arced into the wound and dissipated harmlessly.

Doom didn’t even flinch.

"As expected," Igris murmured, circling now, boots silent against the black stone. "Nothing so simple when it comes to him."

Doom’s answer was another punch a backhand this time, faster than the first, close enough to death that Igris felt the wind of it tear at his cloak as he ducked beneath it and rolled clear, coming up already reversing his grip, already driving the sword in a rising diagonal slash aimed at the inside of Doom’s elbow.

That one connected. Lightning bit deep into Doom, and for the first time something like a grunt rumbled out of Doom’s chest.

Igris didn’t wait to admire the cut. He was already attacking again, weaving low around a stomping kick that cratered the stone where he’d stood, using the momentum of his dodge to spin inside Doom’s guard and drive three rapid strikes shoulder, ribs, the back of the knee each one aimed at a different joint, each one testing, probing, searching for the seam in an armor made of nothing but muscle and unkillable will.

From the platform above, Arthur’s eyes had narrowed, tracking something the crowd below hadn’t caught yet.

"Do you notice that, Didi."

Didi tilted her head, watching the fourth exchange unfold, Igris driving the exact same rising diagonal cut toward Doom’s elbow that had worked moments before, the same angle, the same timing.

It didn’t land, the blade that should have found the target instead skated harmlessly off solid shadow bone.

"...Yes," Didi said slowly. "He adapts. Whatever worked once, doesn’t work the same way twice." She watched Doom answer with a punch that Igris barely twisted clear of. "Such a formidable power. I wonder what your knight intends to do about that."

"That," Arthur said quietly, "is precisely the question."

Below, Igris had already reached the same conclusion, and it showed in the sudden shift of his footwork, no longer repeating patterns, no longer relying on the same angle twice, every strike now deliberately different from the one before it, forcing Doom’s adaptation to chase a target that refused to hold still long enough to be solved.

Doom answered by simply increasing the violence.

His fists came left, right, left again, a storm of punches thrown at a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for something built like a mountain, each blow arriving faster than the last, forcing Igris into a desperate retreat, his blade flashing up again and again to deflect strikes he couldn’t afford to simply dodge anymore. Sparks screamed off crossed steel and stone-hard knuckles. The ground beneath them cratered with every near-miss, every glancing blow, the arena floor turning to rubble in a widening ring around the two combatants.

One punch got through his guard.

Igris caught it on the flat of his blade at the last possible instant, not enough to stop it, only enough to keep it from taking his head off and the impact still sent him hurtling backward through the air, tumbling end over end before he wrenched himself upright mid-flight, boots skidding twin trenches into the stone as he fought his momentum to a halt thirty feet from where he’d started.

"Formidable indeed," he said, straightening, lightning crawling brighter along his blade as he settled back into his defensive stance. "But strength that cannot be aimed is only ever half a weapon, Doom."

Doom’s answer was to come at him again, he was relentless, each stride covering ground that should have taken three times as long, fists already rising for the next exchange.

Igris exhaled once, steadying himself, eyes narrowing as he watched the brute close the distance.

’If nothing that has worked will work again,’ he thought, circling wide, refusing to let his feet plant in the same place twice, ’then the answer is not to find a weakness he can adapt to. It is to make him adapt to so many things, so quickly, that adaptation itself becomes the weakness, I’ll overwhelm him, but I need to be fast.’

He met Doom’s next punch not with steel, but with movement sliding inside the strike’s arc entirely, close enough that the blow passed over his shoulder close enough to feel the heat of displaced air, and from that impossible, intimate range, he drove the demon king’s sword forward in a short, vicious thrust aimed not at muscle or bone, but at the narrow, unprotected line of Doom’s throat.

The blade never reached his throat.

Doom’s arm came up in a blur, catching the thrust across the forearm with an impact that rang out like a struck anvil, the demon king’s sword biting a shallow groove into his shadow hide and stopping dead. For one suspended instant Igris felt the resistance and understood, with the cold clarity of a lifetime spent reading his enemies, exactly what was about to happen.

Doom’s other hand closed around the blade itself.

He tore it from Igris’s grip with a single brutal wrench, steel screeching against bone-plated fingers, and in the same motion drove a punch forward that would have caved in a mountain’s face.

Igris was already gone, twisting backward out of the strike’s path with a speed that left afterimages hanging in the air, and as he retreated his off-hand found the hilt of a dagger sheathed at his hip. He didn’t throw it. He drove it, in one continuing motion of his backward roll, straight down into the back of Doom’s outstretched hand, the one still holding the stolen longsword, burying it to the crossguard.

Doom didn’t roar. He simply looked down at it, almost curious, and then, with no more urgency than a man removing a splinter, pulled the dagger free and hurled it away, discarding both blade and pain in the same indifferent gesture, dropping Igris’s sword to the shattered stone in the process.

Igris raised his hand.

The demon king’s longsword answered, wrenching itself up off the ground in a spiral of blue lightning, crossing the distance between them in a moment to settle back into his waiting palm as though it had never left. He caught it without looking, without breaking his retreat, his eyes fixed on Doom the entire time.

’Enough testing,’ he thought. ’Enough half measures.’

Something shifted in his stance, lightning crawling brighter and faster along the length of his blade until the black steel itself turned into lightning itself.

And then he moved.

What followed was a hurricane given the shape of a swordsman. Igris tore across the arena floor in bursts of lightning-wreathed speed, vanishing and reappearing at angles that defied the eye, striking from the left, then impossibly from the right in the same moment, then from above, then low across the ankles, a storm of strikes arriving from every conceivable direction, each one different from the last, each one designed to deny Doom’s adaptation the single, repeatable pattern it needed to counter.

Doom fought back with everything he had. A fist caught one strike and shattered the stone beneath his own feet with the force of stopping it. An elbow deflected another, sparks screaming off bone. Twin beams of crimson heat vision lanced out, tracking, hunting, and found only afterimages, connecting with empty air and scorching harmless furrows into the arena floor as the real Igris was already elsewhere, already striking again.

Watching from the sidelines, the other Marshals had gone utterly silent.

Ultra’s arms had unfolded, his eyes wide, tracking their moves that was almost too fast to follow. Bellion’s expression, usually carved from stone, had shifted into astonishment. Even H’El, found himself watching, recalculating his estimate of Igris’s abilities with every strike that landed.

"I have fought beside him for a long time," Bellion said quietly, almost to himself, "and I have never seen him fight like this."

/-\

If you Like this story! Check out my other stories! Shadow Monarch: In One Piece / The Witcher: Heir of Fire!

&

If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my p@t-reon / FrenzyAren"

You can Get Access to 7 More Chapters on all of my stories!