Envy pulled back. The fabric of reality melted around him as he did, not as a side effect but as a weapon, his will reaching into the substance of existence itself and setting it aflame, the domain he commanded responding to his intent with absolute obedience.

The fire of it was not ordinary fire. It was the burning of reality’s own material, the kind of conflagration that consumed the laws governing a space rather than the objects within it.

Dark moved through it the way a man moves through rain on a summer afternoon.

Not around it, through it, his form passing through the dissolution of reality as though reality’s opinions about what should and should not be able to exist within its burning were simply not applicable to him.

He bore wounds. That much was true and worth noting.

Burns marked his skin in irregular patches, cuts ran across his arms and torso from the exchanges that had compounded across the million simultaneous engagements, blisters from diseases dotted his neck and hands, the residue of horrors that had touched him during the cascading trial and left their marks before he had moved past them.

The evidence of genuine contact was there, but none of it fazed him, and none of it accumulated into anything that resembled a meaningful limitation on what he was doing or how he was doing it.

Envy processed this with the cold clarity of a mind that had survived long enough to know the difference between a problem it could solve and a problem it could not, and had learned to make that distinction quickly.

No law wished to harm Dark. That was the only framework that accounted for what he was observing. It was as though reality itself, even the reality that Envy commanded and controlled and had bent to his will, wished to protect that thing.

Not actively, not through any mechanism Envy could identify and target, but passively, as if it was in its nature by law or was simply forced into it.

Every force he directed, every law he invoked, every aspect of the domain that answered to his authority, all of it behaved in Dark’s presence as though it had received different instructions from a higher source and was following those instead.

He was a Monarch and his domain was under his control. He was not contesting for it, because Dark was not attempting to take it. That thing was not fighting for dominance over the laws that governed this pocket of space.

It was simply ignoring the space’s rules entirely, either through something beyond Envy’s understanding or through a presence so fundamentally before the existence of rules that the rules had no category in which to place him and therefore no mechanism by which to apply themselves.

Either way, the result was the same.

He had no advantage over Dark. None.

Envy’s true strength, the core of what made him dangerous to things far beyond his apparent level, was his law. Not his forms, not the million shapes and faces and stolen truths and borrowed powers he could bring to bear, impressive as those were.

His law was the blade that cut enemies stronger than himself in ways that strength alone could not account for. When he decided to take something from someone, the original owner began to lose their grip on it, slowly and without always being able to identify the source of the loss, weakened incrementally across however many iterations it required until what had been taken was gone, remembered and controlled only by Envy, its new master.

It was how he had always fought things beyond his weight. Not by matching them blow for blow but by cutting them a million times in places they could not see, removing their strength piece by piece until what remained was manageable.

It was patient and methodical and had never failed him. It required him to be able to envy the target.

He could not envy Dark. His law simply refused to acknowledge his desire to envy, no matter how much he willed it.

Simply unable to find a purchase on something the world did not fully register as existing within the categories envy required.

His blade was useless, which left his shield, and his shield was not enough.

The million forms, the immense accumulated strength he had built across an existence of taking and replacing and becoming, the truths he could weaponize and the fears he could unleash and the emotions he could turn into physical forces capable of cracking the foundations of lesser minds, all of it thrown against Dark had produced wounds on his own body and mild inconvenience in Dark’s.

The sage eye had been his last genuine option, his most reliable ending move, the technique that had brought the mightiest he had ever faced to something approaching an even field.

Dragging an opponent into a million simultaneous trials, splitting their consciousness across a million separate engagements where every injury was real and compounded across every version of the fight at once, the accumulated damage building faster than any single mind could process or any single body could repair.

Dark had simply walked through it.

He had come out the other side with burns and cuts and blisters and not a single injury that suggested the experience had been anything other than a mildly eventful passage of time.

That left only the million forms. A third of his true strength if he was being generous with the estimate, and he was not confident it was enough to matter, let alone to win.

He was still processing the arithmetic of his own inadequacy when the tip of the blade found the space he had moved into.

It missed his neck by a margin that was not comfortable to contemplate and cut instead into his collarbone, opening another wound that ran immediately, adding itself to the collection of injuries that were bleeding fire across his current form.

Envy pulled back further, creating distance, buying the seconds his mind needed to find something, anything to give him a fighting chance.

"It seems you have figured out that I am a bad matchup to fight against."

Dark’s voice cut into Envy’s churning mind with the particular quality of something that did not need to raise itself to be heard clearly, calm, careless, and entirely unbothered.

He chuckled and added. "Well, don’t feel too bad about it. I am a bad matchup for anyone in the cosmos."

The words landed like blades, not because they were sharp but because they were accurate, and accuracy in the mouth of an enemy carries its own specific kind of pain.

Envy felt the anger flare through him at the truth of them, at the helplessness the truth described, and beneath the anger, a thought began to form that was worse than either.

The thought of dying here.

He erased it before it could finish taking shape, believing that just thinking it would give it meaning. Giving it the first foothold it needed to become real rather than merely possible, and he would be damned before he gave meaning to something like that.

The thought dissolved before it could settle, leaving only the anger and the helplessness.

"I WILL DRAG YOU TO HELL." The roar tore out of him, a shockwave of flames gushing forth with him as the center.

Reality responded to it, the space around them crumbling at its edges, the mirror sky fracturing and melting, the carefully maintained structure of the domain destabilizing under the force of his intent.

Without pausing, without giving Dark a moment to set a response, he dove.

Straight down, into the mirror ocean below, his form shifting mid-descent, changing as he fell.

"Tempting offer," Dark said from somewhere above, his voice carrying the same conversational ease it had carried throughout everything, as though being invited to hell was a social proposition he was weighing on its merits.

"But I have been reliably informed that hell is not a particularly pleasant destination." A pause. "You go visit it yourself."

The obsidian blade carved through the crumbling reality with a clean, dark arc, and Dark dove into the mirror ocean after him with the same careless smile he had worn through the entire engagement.

The mirror rippled once, a single expanding ring traveling outward from the point of entry, and then stilled.

Dark rose from the surface and stood atop it.

The featureless sky stretched above in its silent expanse, its reflection stretching below him on the mirror, the two voids facing each other across the surface he stood on.

"Little worm," Dark said, his deep eyes finding Envy’s shifting form across the stillness, "You are not half bad. Understanding the second branch of Envy at your current stage of power is no small thing."

He paused. "Though I suppose that sounded more like a compliment than I intended."

It had not sounded like a compliment. It had sounded like something considerably worse than an insult, which was the particular sting of praise delivered by something that considered your achievements modest by the standards it was applying.