For a moment, there was silence, just nothing but the crackle of flame and the slow descent of glowing debris. Magneto's eyes scanned the ground where Gojo had been, but the boy was gone.
He turned left, then right, a flicker of unease seeping into his gaze. His senses strained, feeling for any shift, any pull in the fields. And then—
There.
A trail of molten light carved its way through the earth, a furious orange vein slashing toward him at breakneck speed, melting rock and steel as it surged.
Magneto reacted instantly. He gestured, sending shards of metal, twisted beams, and jagged spikes slamming downward into the earth to impale whatever was coming. The ground shuddered with impact—
—but the trail kept coming.
With a sudden eruption, the molten force burst upward, a sphere of fire and lightning surging out of the earth, burning so hot it seemed to ripple through the air itself. It shot toward him with terrifying speed—
Magneto's hands snapped forward, his eyes glowing with focused fury. He clenched the air, manipulating the magnetic fields with precision, freezing the ball of molten energy mid-air, locking it in a cage of his will. The fire hissed, hardened, the lightning dimming as Magneto exerted crushing pressure.
He focused, every nerve burning as he sought to collapse the sphere, to snuff it out like a dying star—
A voice whispered beside him.
"Hey."
Magneto's head snapped to the left in alarm
—and was met with an overwhelming wave of repulsion.
The force slammed into him like a mountain-sized fist, a blast of raw kinetic energy that sent him hurtling backward with impossible speed. The magnetized sphere, destabilized by the sudden burst, detonated just as Magneto was flung into its core.
The explosion erupted with a deafening roar. Lightning crackled across the battlefield, arcs of blinding energy lashing out in every direction. The shockwave cratered the earth, sending debris skidding across the field like shrapnel.
As the dust began to settle, a figure emerged from the storm of heat and light.
Gojo.
His eyes, once the gem blue, now burned with a searing red glow, trailing ribbons of heat that shimmered into the air like smoke rising from a furnace. His breath came slow, steady with blood at the side of his lips and his body all roughed up, and every exhale seemed to warp the air around him due to the excessive amount of heat he was exuding.
His gaze looking through the dust at hMagneto through the fading dust.
This wasn't over.
Not yet.
The moment Gojo's gaze locked onto Magneto, the air itself seemed to warp. His eyes, still glowing with scathing, molten heat, shimmered with an intensity that made the very air shimmer, rippling like a mirage on a summer day.
Almost instantly, all the metal in the surroundings, shattered girders, vehicles, twisted debris, even flecks of iron-rich dust—levitated, vibrating under Magneto's control. With a simple, imperious gesture, Magneto sent them surging through the dispersing dust cloud like a swarm of metallic locusts, twisting and reforming into hundreds of deadly constructs—puppets shaped like dolls, each crowned with drill-like heads that spun furiously, their magnetic fields thrumming with lethal energy.
The air shimmered as the armada streaked toward Gojo.
Gojo's eyes now radiating raw, molten fury—flared. The red glow intensified, a searing beam of pure, focused heat erupted from his eyes. It wasn't just heat but a highly compressed thermal energy, laced with faint white sparks that danced along its edges, a manifestation of sheer, raw force.
The beam shot directly toward the incoming horde, carving a molten line in the air. The first wave of drones seemed to bend the beam, the heat warping harmlessly around them. Gojo clicked his tongue, halting his attack, his eyes still alight, the heat waves trailing up from his eyes like spectral smoke.
From above, Magneto's voice echoed with calm arrogance "It's no use, boy. I don't know how you survived, but you should have stayed down."
Gojo didn't reply. A wry, dangerous smirk curled his lips as his right hand ignited, glowing a deep, blinding orange. Then, in a blink, he dropped from mid-air, crashing into the ground with a shockwave that spiderwebbed the earth beneath him. The ground fractured and groaned under the force, fissures spreading outward like a ripple in water.
In the next instant, Gojo punched forward, his fist trailing an eruption of heat and force so immense that the very air compressed, bursting outward in a shockwave. The entire ground in front of him liquefied, melting into a river of molten rock, the metallic drones caught in its path screaming and twisting as they dissolved, their forms warping and vanishing in the torrent. The flames that roared along the shockwave flickered with a faint, golden luminescence, as if reality itself flickered in the heat.
Magneto, however, hovered to the side, encased in a shimmering, multi-layered magnetic barrier, narrowly dodging the destructive wave. In his mind, a flash of confusion, 'It should have bent around them… the drones were protected by a dynamic magnetic field lattice. An impassable shield… they were supposed to be invulnerable!'
The realization was bitter. Gojo's raw power, his searing heat, didn't obey the conventional rules of electromagnetic manipulation as it was a direct manifestation of force and rejectionn, bypassing the natural phenomena that Magneto controlled.
Before Magneto could process further he immediately jumped and flew into the air as something pinged on his layered force field, the ground beneath his previous position erupted, shredded as if caught in a high-powered particle blender, chunks of rock and molten metal vaporizing mid-air.
Magneto ascended higher, trying to recalibrate. As he reached the sky, he came face to face with Gojo, now floating mid-air. His eyes still blazed with red-hot heat, shimmering like a demon's, as if molten iron flowed through his veins.
Without warning, a bolt of lightning cracked down, aimed squarely at Magneto.
With a scoff, Magneto sneered,)
"Fool. I control the electromagnetic spectrum. Electricity is mine to command!"
He extended a hand, and the lightning halted mid-air, coiling and churning like a captured beast, raw power under his command.
But then Gojo's smirk deepened. The space around the lightning warped, glowing golden, as if the space itself was being rewritten or pushed away creating a path, suddenly the bolt surged forward faster, sharper, more precise and struck Magneto with a concussive blast that sent him reeling, his magnetic field fracturing for a split second.
Magneto's scream was sharp, his voice laced with disbelief "How?!"
Gojo's eyes narrowed, the heat rising from them intensifying as he thought,
'Wouldn't it be stupid to expect your opponent to explain his powers?'
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