[Ouroboros Avarice.]
Panthor's blade screamed toward my face, his eyes bottomless pits of shadow, his gaze carrying the chill of graves and the silence of endings.
Yet as he struck, I twisted my spear in a wide arc, his sword plunging harmlessly into the ground.
Momentum favored me, and my fist met his chest, the impact shattering the air and sending him crashing back through the dust.
Without pause, I hurled my spear, its shaft spinning with divine precision until it pierced his right hand and pinned him to the earth.
I appeared above him in an instant and drove my heel into his stomach with enough force to crater the ground.
"You are greedy, Panthor. You reached too far, clutching at power you were never meant to hold."
Cracks spidered across his skin, pale marble fracturing under invisible strain.
He smiled faintly.
"Greed? You reduce me to that? Greed implies wanting. Wanting implies lacking. I am beyond lack."
I chuckled, lowering my spear until its point grazed his throat.
"No… you lack everything. Just like Nicholas. That hollow behind your eyes, the kind that eats meaning until even hunger forgets itself… that is what stares back at me."
The cracks deepened, glowing faintly as he whispered,
"You assume nothingness is emptiness. It isn't. I feel everything. The cold, the grief, the end of all things. You're the one who numbs yourself just to keep going."
"Then tell me," I said, my voice sharp as a blade, "are you winning this fight, Panthor?"
Before his answer could form, black smoke spilled from my mouth. I stumbled, coughing ash. My senses blurred.
A curse. He had woven it into his aura, undetectable and absolute.
I turned, just barely glimpsing Sansir collapsed on the ground, barely breathing.
When I looked back, Panthor was already moving.
His emotionless mask revealed nothing as he surged forward, his fist tearing past my face. I pivoted, but blood sprayed from my cheek.
I gritted my teeth, snatched my spear, spun it once, and deflected his next strike.
He was faster now, impossibly so, each step warping the ground.
Then his voice cut through the clash, cold and deliberate.
"Fall. This is the path you carved. Submit to it."
A blink, and I was on the ground. His blade pressed to my throat, gleaming like the edge of eternity.
"Why run?" he murmured. "Clinging to life… is that your greed talking?"
The blade shifted. I felt the cold air slice across my neck.
My head rolled, but I caught it mid-fall, reattaching it with little more than will. My smirk returned, bloodied but intact.
His eyes darkened further. "Or maybe you finally fear something."
Dark spikes erupted from the earth, impaling my shoulders and pinning me down. Pain rippled through me, the kind that transcends flesh.
I fell backward, staring into a sky flashing blue before collapsing again into black.
Then, through that void, I saw. I reached beyond the veil of causality, into the script of existence itself.
My hand brushed the threads of destiny, and I rewrote them. The highest order of fate, undone.
Panthor's sword descended. It should have ended me.
But instead, my spear materialized through his throat, gleaming with impossible light.
His eyes widened, not in pain but in recognition.
"Lizard of Nothing: Inago."
Void poured from his wound, swallowing the field.
His Regalia revealed itself, an infinite expanse of absence where matter and time crumbled into silence.
He stood within it, sovereign of the void, a prince of erasure.
The void engulfed me whole. Reality blinked out.
But I remained.
With a slow exhale, I lifted my spear through the nothingness. Its glow fractured the emptiness like glass.
My Regalia, controlled eternity, refused the constraints of any law: space, time, causality, even reality itself.
And so I moved, untethered.
Panthor blinked, appearing beyond the void's reach but not unscathed, a clean gash running down his cheek, black blood hissing against the air.
He spoke again, voice calm yet ardent.
"Eternity is stagnation, Ouroboros. You cling to continuity because it assures you you're real."
I shook my head in pity. "But continuity is just a gilded cage. The void frees you from pretending meaning lasts. That is my truth."
His gaze shifted. "Freedom without continuity is oblivion. You call it release, but it is erasure. Nothing more than mindless emptiness."
Panthor's wings unfurled, vast and draconic, dripping with shadow.
"Creation is just refined greed. You hoard existence, binding what should pass naturally."
"Then let us see whose truth holds," I said, thrusting forward.
Our weapons met, spear against sword. Every clash collapsed mountains of air. Every strike bore scripture. Every word was a spell.
"Greed," Panthor intoned, parrying. "The will to take what should not be yours."
"Nothing," I countered, striking low, my voice resonating like a verdict. "The arrogance to believe taking ends with you."
Power convulsed through the air, rippling outward like the final tremors of a dying deity.
The ground fractured beneath us, groaning under forces beyond comprehension.
Seizing the moment, I drove my hand into his face and slammed him into the earth with cataclysmic force.
The impact sundered the landscape, birthing a crater vast enough to swallow the horizon.
Then, with the immensity of eternity itself, I thrust my spear through his heart. The heavens seemed to shudder.
"Do you feel that, Panthor?" I asked, my tone both cold and solemn. "The sound of your existence unraveling?"
He reached out, fingers trembling, clawing weakly at my chest.
His grip faltered, yet his lips curled into a mirthless smile before laughter burst forth, fractured between triumph and despair.
"Yes," he gasped.
"But I also feel the grass under my back, and your loathing, and the tremor in your pulse. I feel the fear you're hiding behind that victory. I hear the voice in your head screaming relief."
A sound began to pulse in my ears, a dark cadence, rhythmic and ancient.
My body convulsed. Blackened blood spilled from my throat, thick and corrupted.
"Death?" I rasped. "Is that the sound of death itself?"
Panthor's laughter turned to sobs, then back again, cycling between ecstasy and torment.
"Yes," he howled.
"That is it. Taste it. The ash on your tongue, the iron, the soil. Feel the rhythm beating inside you. That is death rattling its chains around your throat."
The sensation consumed me. It tasted of scorched ash and decay, reeking of rusted blood and dust.
It resounded like a funeral drum echoing through eternity, and its touch was suffocating, like a cord drawn tight around my neck.
I had never tasted death before, not truly. The raw, primordial essence of it was intoxicating, overwhelming, divine in its terror.
To grasp such a concept, one that stood above existence itself, was both blasphemy and revelation. Perhaps Panthor was right to revel in it.
To harness such vileness and call it beauty required a madness that verged on godhood.
A blinding surge of obsidian light erupted from him, launching me skyward.
Above, a vast orb of annihilation began to form, veins of void writhing within a shell of perfect darkness. Its gravitational pull warped reality; it was destruction incarnate.
Unrestrained, it could scour not just this world, but all worlds. A lunatic's spell, reckless, magnificent, apocalyptic.
He was barely capable of standing, his body cracking under the strain, and still he conjured it.
What a fool, I thought, as his laughter rose again, wild, broken, and radiant.
He wept as the sphere consumed him, expanding beyond reason and tearing apart the seams of existence.
Its magnitude was unbounded, devouring dimensions and collapsing the barriers between them.
It approached a cataclysmic scale, no, something greater, something bordering on cosmic erasure.
So I yielded to it.
I embraced its hunger, allowing it to devour me whole. Its enormity shredded my body, mind, and soul, leaving me trembling at the precipice of oblivion.
When I fell from the sky, dazed and hollow, I was scarcely alive.
My senses returned in warped clarity, every breath, heartbeat, and whisper of existence magnified and distorted.
Panthor emerged from the wreckage, restored to that terrible serenity, emotionless once more. His sword gleamed black with void's residue as he raised it toward my throat.
"Now," he said, his voice as calm as it was cruel, "I want you to grovel. And as you kneel before death, I want you to scream in rejection of it."