The chamber on the other side had long since lost its structure. Metal pillars lay crushed, walls caved inward and the floor was fractured into uneven slabs.
At the center of it all, Virgos moved like a storm given form.
Chains screamed through the air. Caius met them head-on. His fists crashed into the incoming links, shattering their momentum with raw force.
Each punch landed like a hammer, sending cracks across the ground. He did not dodge much. He endured, stepped forward and destroyed whatever came in his way.
Virgos twisted his scythe, redirecting a chain mid-flight to wrap around Caius's arm. "You always had this problem."
Caius ripped the chain apart with brute force.
"I chose mine what to do. I don't you... to leave me but... I don't want to leave those nice guys too..." he said.
Virgos vaulted forward, scythe descending in a sharp arc.
Caius blocked with his forearm, the blade carving into his skin just enough to draw blood before he slammed his other fist upward. The impact forced Virgos to disengage, landing lightly a few meters away.
"So, you chose them." Virgos continued, circling slowly. "After everything this world did to you. After everything we saw."
Caius stepped forward again, crushing a fallen beam beneath his foot. "I..."
Virgos laughed, though there was bitterness in it. "You think they will fix it? You think struggle gives meaning?" His chains lashed outward again, faster now. "All it does is to repeat the same circle of struggling."
Caius charged through the barrage. A chain struck his side, another his shoulder but he kept moving, closing the distance with unstoppable momentum.
"I... am not fixing the world." Caius said, driving a punch that shattered the ground beneath Virgos's feet.
"I am choosing where I stand in it."
Virgos landed, sliding back, eyes narrowing.
"Then stand and see how long that choice survives!"
Virgos struck first with intent.
The chained scythe split apart mid-swing, both blades separating along the links as he hurled them forward in a crossing trajectory. The chains followed like guided serpents, curving unnaturally to predict Caius's movement.
Caius shifted his stance and dodged the first swing, stepping inside the second. The blade scraped across his shoulder instead of his neck, drawing a line of blood, but he ignored it and drove a straight punch toward Virgos's center.
Virgos pulled the chains tight. The blades snapped back instantly.
Caius's punch collided with the returning scythe shaft, the impact ringing through the chamber. The force still pushed Virgos back a step, but not enough.
Virgos twisted his wrists. The chains coiled around Caius's arm in a tightening spiral.
Before Caius could tear free, Virgos yanked hard and used the momentum to launch himself forward.
His knee slammed into Caius's ribs, followed immediately by a downward scythe strike aimed at his collarbone.
Caius blocked with his forearm again. The blade bit shallow but the impact forced him down to one knee.
Virgos did not stop. He layered the assault.
The chain extended again, wrapping around Caius's leg this time while the opposite blade whipped across horizontally.
Caius leaned back just enough to avoid a lethal cut but the chain tightened and dragged him forward across the fractured floor.
Virgos pivoted and accelerated.
The scythe spun once, twice, then three times in rapid succession. Each rotation generated a different angle of attack, forcing Caius to react continuously.
A strike came low, then high, then directly through the centerline. The sequence overlapped so tightly that there was no clear gap to counter. Caius took the hits intentionally.
The chain cracked across his torso, another strike clipped his thigh, and the final rotation slammed into his guard with explosive force, sending him sliding backward several meters.
The ground split beneath his heels. Caius exhaled sharply, muscles tightening as he forced himself upright again. Virgos advanced without pause. He was no longer testing.
The scythe moved faster now, the chains snapping and retracting in precise intervals, each motion building into the next. He did not rely on strength alone.
The battlefield had stopped resembling a room long ago. What remained was a shattered arena of torn steel and fractured ground, illuminated only by stray fires and sparks that refused to die.
Virgos attacked through it like a relentless current, his chained scythe carving arcs that stitched the air into a lethal web.
The chains did not simply attack in casual sense; they dictated space. One blade drove Caius back while another cut off retreat, the links tightening, loosening, redirecting momentum with surgical precision.
Caius answered with brute force, fists smashed through the incoming steel, shoulders taking glancing blows that would have felled lesser fighters.
Virgos increased the tempo, stacking attacks so tightly that even a moment of hesitation would mean dismemberment.
Caius endured, stepped in, shattered the chain coiling his arm and retaliated with a devastating hook that forced Virgos to pivot away at the last instant.
The clash became faster, heavier, more dangerous, as if both men understood that the line between survival and being forgotten was thinning with every exchange.
Then something had changed.
Caius's breathing changed. It deepened, roughened, became uneven. His muscles tensed beyond control, veins rising beneath his skin as if something inside him was pushing outward.
When the next chain struck him across the chest, he did not deflect it. He grabbed it. The metal snapped under his grip. His eyes lost clarity, darkening into something feral.
He stepped forward again but this time there was no restraint, no calculation. Only pure force. His punch did not aim anything like he was blindfolded. The attack this time was meant to destroy everything in path.
The ground beneath Virgos shattered as Caius advanced on step.
Virgos adjusted instantly, redirecting the scythe, binding Caius's limbs in rapid succession to limit his movement but Caius tore through it all. The chains snapped up.
The precision that had once controlled the fight began to fail against something raw, something spiraling beyond reason. Caius was no longer choosing where to stand. He was becoming a force that would crush everything in reach, ally or enemy alike.
Virgos felt it, " So, you are out of your mind again... "
For the first time, hesitation entered his movements. He launched himself upward, intending to strike a disabling blow, something precise enough to end the escalation without killing him.
For a fraction of a second, the battlefield disappeared from his sight.
In its place stood a quiet sky, untouched by fire or ruin. A figure stood there, just beyond reach. There was... Agripha.
Not as a memory fractured by grief, but as she had been. Calm, distant and real enough to make the world feel unbearably hollow without her.
Her eyes did not accuse. They did not forgive. They simply existed, beyond everything he had tried to fix, beyond every justification he had built.
Virgos's breath caught.
"All his sacrifices, all his convictions, all his certainty about remaking the world to eliminate suffering... none of it had saved what I cared for. None of it had even reached her.
Even kindness carries the seed of cruelty, for all comfort shadows the memory of despair. I wanted to create a new world... because, every heart holds a cathedral of suffering and every eye has witnessed the sermons of cruelty... I wanted to end it... how much... someone just tell me... how much more this humanity has to suffer...
There is no design where all things become good. Only designs where something is denied the right to exist. And I chose what that something was… without ever questioning why it had to be chosen at all."
The system he believed broken had taken her, and the world he intended to create would not bring her back. It would only erase everything else in the process.
The scythe trembled in his hands as the chains loosened.
Caius roared, charging forward, completely out of control now, his next strike carrying enough force to shatter Virgos entirely. The distance between them vanished.
Virgos lowered his weapon. Completely. His guard dropped, his stance open, his body no longer resisting.
"Caius," he said softly, voice cutting through the chaos with a strange clarity,
"If this world could not keep her… then I have no reason to correct it anymore."
The blow landed.
It was not clean. It was not controlled. It was raw, devastating force crashing into an unmoving body.
The impact sent a shockwave across the broken battlefield, dust and fire erupting outward as Virgos was thrown back, the chains scattered lifelessly around him.
Caius staggered forward, breath ragged, the rage still burning in his chest but something had stopped it from going further.
Virgos tilted his head, focusing through the haze of pain. Even now, he thought of the boy he once knew, of the young man he had hoped Caius could become. Perhaps, at least, he could live happily now... maybe. Who knows.
Perhaps he could find peace with friends beside him, laughter unburdened by vengeance or endless struggle. That thought alone warmed him slightly.
Caius stepped closer. Virgos's eyes narrowed briefly, expecting violence.
But instead, Caius knelt beside him, silent for a heartbeat, then spoke in fragments in broken, inexplicit sentences that carried no threat.
Virgos turned toward him, lips curled slightly.
"Then live." he whispered, voice weak but steady. "Live happily… your remaining life… however it lasts. Just remember, you are not a monster... do not become me. "
Caius' gaze softened but he could not speak clearly. Virgos smiled at him one last time, crimson light from his wounds dimmed in the haze.
He tilted his head upward as a shaft of light cut through the smoke from above, illuminating him like the final stage of a dying star.
Virgos exhaled slowly, feeling the warmth of that light. His body was becoming weak, a strange relief hit his soul. His eyes fluttered closed.
Caius' chest tightened suddenly as realization struck. "No… no, Virgos…" He reached out instinctively, shaking his shoulder lightly.
His voice broke. "I am a monster… my brother… my brother is gone."
Tears ran down his face unchecked. He clutched the chains scattered around the floor, the cry of their battle faded.
Virgos had died calmly, smiling faintly, leaving the world to continue without him, leaving Caius with the burden of survival, grief and the fragile hope that he would honor the life Virgos had silently wished for him.