"Fuck off...!"

After a short while, Envy finally snapped. The mask he wore was still eerily smiling, but beneath it, he was already seething. He couldn’t make a single move of his own with how relentlessly Axel was pressing on him.

"Stop bothering me...!" He growled.

The next moment, the two clones moved side-by-side—as if silently agreeing to abandon the pincer formation.

But it wasn’t just that.

As the two copies lined up beside each other, Axel immediately clocked what Envy was going for. One stays on his front. The other falls back. A bait-and-switch—force Axel to deal with the closer clone first, buying just enough time for the retreating one to slip out of reach.

"Tsk!"

His tongue clicked against his teeth.

The worst part? He couldn’t chase one while ignoring the other. He’d have to drive the nearer clone back before even thinking about stopping the second. One beat too slow. Every single time.

Then a new copy appeared.

Just like the others, its power hadn’t diminished in the slightest—still sitting right at the peak, as if the original had simply been xeroxed and pressed into the world fully-formed. Axel couldn’t figure out the mechanics behind it, and frankly, that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that there were three of them, and keeping all three in check simultaneously—alone—was bordering on impossible.

If he truly wanted to push past his limits, he’d have to crank Overdrive to the ceiling and hold it there for as long as his body allowed. Handle all three at once. Burn himself out doing it.

That wasn’t something he could sustain, either.

"Bring it on...!"

Still, he didn’t back off.

The God’s Mineral pillar swung without pause—wide, heavy arcs that kept two copies dancing just outside his range. Then, for whatever came lunging from behind, he answered with kicks. Blind ones. Ones thrown entirely on reflex and instinct, because there was no other way.

He couldn’t see what was behind him, after all.

So whenever their roles rotated, Axel ate a hit. Once out of every three exchanges. Like clockwork.

And those curved knives of Envy’s were wrong in some quiet, insidious way. The wounds they carved simply refused to close. Blood kept coming—slow, persistent, unyielding—bleeding him out a drop at a time. His massive HP pool, something that had always felt almost absurd in its size, was draining like a cracked basin. He watched it fall. And fall. Until there was nearly nothing left.

Barely a minute had passed since the fight began.

"Haaa...!"

Axel was on his knees.

The God’s Mineral Pillar jutted from the ground beside him, used now as little more than a cane to keep him upright. Blood traced thin lines from the corners of his lips, from his eyes, from his nose—streaking down his face like something painted rather than real. His back was a ruin beneath his tattered clothes, wounds layered over wounds.

By any reasonable measure, the fact that he was still conscious was a mystery. The fact that he was still breathing was somehow even more so.

"""Looks like the show’s about to end?"""

All three copies spoke in unison. They walked toward him unhurried—leisurely, almost—curved daggers hanging loose at their sides like they had all the time in the world. Axel’s hands twitched toward the pillar. The instinct was there. But the strength wasn’t, and they both knew it.

Even if he swung, they’d read it. Step aside. Punish the opening the moment his momentum committed him to the motion.

So he let them come. Kept still. Waited.

"You... demon bastard..." The words scraped out of him like gravel. "Even if... I fall here... You... will die with me...!"

"What?"

"Are you serious?"

"Hahaha! You must’ve gone crazy!"

Three voices, three reactions—yet all saying the same thing. Mocking him. A dying man rattling off a death threat like it was supposed to mean something. To Envy, it was comedy. The kind of joke that almost didn’t need a punchline.

Except—it wasn’t a joke.

"""...!"""

The mana hit him first. Before the sight of it, before the sound—just the sheer pressure of it, radiating off Axel like heat off a forge. The air around him warped visibly, bending the light in slow, mirage-like ripples. Dense enough that it had begun to materialize, curling around his frame in faint, luminous wisps.

Envy’s three copies stilled.

Axel, true to his word, was trying to take him with him.

The thought had been simple, brutal logic. Envy was too dangerous. If Axel died here and left him breathing, the girls would have to face this thing alone. If his life could close that equation—if spending it here, now, meant this threat died with him—then he wouldn’t hesitate.

’Ah... But this sucks...’

Not that he wanted to die. He wasn’t doing it for some noble ideal or because living for others had ever been his creed. It was simpler and worse than that. The image of what came after—Envy standing over the girls once Axel was gone—had settled behind his ribs like a splinter of ice. Cold. Immovable.

He couldn’t live with that future. So he’d make sure it didn’t happen.

The mana kept building. Condensing into the pillar, threading through the God’s Mineral lattice until the mineral itself began to fracture—fine cracks spider-webbing across its surface from pressure alone. The three copies hesitated. Envy, for the first time, was weighing his options. Come closer and risk it. Fall back and maybe outrun it.

Neither option felt clean.

"MASTER!"

"...!"

The voice cut through everything.

He’d have known it anywhere—Fenrir.

Half on reflex, Axel’s hand was already in his inventory. His fingers closed around something familiar: a club. Bellachrona’s, from the incident not so long ago.

"CATCH!" He hurled it toward her voice.

With the strength he had left, it didn’t travel far—but Fenrir was already moving, already there, snatching it cleanly out of the air mid-stride. "GOT IT!"

A split second to read the field.

Axel, battered and bleeding, braced against a God’s Mineral pillar. Envy—three of him, same presence, same scent, same grinning mask—closing in with curved daggers drawn. And the club in her hands, made of the same God’s Mineral as the pillar at Axel’s side.

She understood immediately.

One massive stride—closing the gap of several dozen meters like it was nothing—and she swung. Low, deliberate, angled like a golf drive. Overdrive at 1000% output. Fast enough that not one of the three copies registered the motion before it was already over.

The swing landed true.

Right on his jewels.

"BUFU!"

All three copies bent over simultaneously—the copy she’d struck, and the two standing a distance apart from him, folding in perfect, involuntary unison. Had the mask not been there, both Axel and Fenrir might’ve seen just how blue his face had gone.

"...!"

Axel stared.

Something clicked.

A hint—small, but undeniable—about exactly how the copies worked.