"Little worm," Dark said, his voice carrying the same careless ease it had carried through everything that had preceded this, as though the shifting, impossible monstrosity assembling itself across the mirror ocean from him was simply the latest entry in a long list of unremarkable Tuesdays. "You have certainly decided to make your final minutes as painful and as insane as possible."

A small chuckle followed the observation, unhurried and genuine.

"You made me, you monster." Envy’s voice came out layered and overlapping. "I will drag you to Hell even if it costs me my life and my sanity."

The thousand voices beneath his own were grinding against each other like shifting teeth and fangs that could not agree on their arrangement, a constant low-level war within the sound itself for which shape to hold.

He was not speaking in metaphor.

Both of those things were genuinely on the table. Both of them were being placed there deliberately, staked against the possibility of crushing the thing across the mirror ocean from him, and what he would do after that, assuming he existed, was a problem for a version of himself that had survived long enough to have problems.

Envy rarely combined his forms. The practice of selecting aspects from multiple stolen identities and layering them allowed him to push his capabilities past the limits his own power could reach by conventional means, which was itself an extraordinary thing.

But every additional form added to the combination multiplied the cost. The emotions clashed, the authorities fought each other for dominance within the same space, and the world’s laws looked at what was being assembled and found it abominable.

The world pressed back against the construction with the reflexive rejection of existence encountering something it had not sanctioned and did not wish to accommodate.

The strain on his mind and soul compounded with every form added. This was known to him, and this was why he avoided it even when the tactical case for it was strong.

What he was doing now was not merely crossing that line; he was making such a risk look like a far better choice.

Under ordinary circumstances, even the threat of death would not have moved him to this. Death was not the end for someone like him.

His King would remake him, restore him, reconstitute whatever had been broken or lost, and return him to existence whole, albeit changed by the experience.

It would take months of recovery, and it would not be pleasant. But he would survive it, and survival across months of reconstruction was a price he understood how to pay.

But he knew, with the particular certainty that if he died here, in this place, at the hands of that thing standing on the mirror surface, there would be no reconstruction.

No King reaching into the void and pulling him back from it. No months of slow and painful return, just the end, clean and permanent and without any door left in it.

True death.

The kind that did not leave anything behind worth collecting, and that’s why he was doing this.

Taking on a single impossible impression already invited madness into his being, opening the door to the chaos that lived on the other side of becoming something the cosmos knew was not real, and letting it walk through him in exchange for the power it brought.

What he was doing now was taking multiple such impressions simultaneously and combining them, entering territory that had no map because no version of himself had ever been desperate enough or cornered enough to go there.

His mind would not survive this intact. He knew that with the same certainty, he knew his name. Even if he lived, the version of him that walked out of this space would be broken in ways that would take time and effort and possibly more than either to address.

Insanity was not a metaphor here. It was an outcome he was accepting in advance, weighed against the alternative, and found preferable.

Because insanity could be recovered from, but true death could not.

"I will live," Envy growled, his voice dropping beneath the layers of borrowed sound into something rawer and more fundamental, "And you will die."

His form convulsed.

What emerged from the convulsion was revolting in a way that went beyond aesthetic.

A multi-eyed face of dark green and blackened shadow, each eye a different size and positioned without any organizing principle, stared outward with the collective, unfocused attention of something that had too many ways of seeing.

Horns curled from its head, their edges needle-sharp. Six long, gnarled centipede forms burst from the back of its neck. Butterfly wings extended from the mass, stretching too long and too wide, their span wrong in proportion to everything else they were attached to.

A chest and neck that had once belonged to something almost human connected to whip-like tentacles where arms should have been, one ending in a clean, sharp blade, the other also a blade lined with curved teeth that faced inward along the edge.

Below all of this, where legs should have been, the flesh had fused and melted and reformed into the armored, scaled length of a serpent.

It was not frightening the way that powerful things were frightening. It was frightening the way that wrong things were frightening, the specific, deep-seated revulsion of encountering something the universe had not designed and did not endorse.

"Yeah," Dark said. "That is not happening."

The carelessness was still there, the same easy quality it had carried from the beginning.

But his eyes had shifted, as the darkness in them had deepened, settling into something denser and more present, the casual lightness of his expression not disappearing but becoming a surface over something considerably less casual beneath it.

His grip around the blade had firmed, the adjustment small and precise, because as much as Dark appeared unbothered, he was not a fool about what stood across the mirror ocean from him.

Envy was an apex creature of this world, one of its absolute peak authority, shaped by an existence of accumulation and theft, and the patient, methodical construction of a self that was already a monster before it took everything it could.

Now, cornered, out of options, with both life and sanity staked on a single outcome, he was more dangerous than any being at this scale had any right to be.

Desperation in something this powerful was not a weakness. It was a different kind of strength, uncontrolled and therefore unpredictable, willing to pay costs that calculated power would never authorize.

And Dark, for all the absolute truth of what he was, was operating on borrowed time.

In a borrowed body. A body that was not even at the peak of what an Elemental Ruler could be, housing something that had no business being housed in it.

He was existing in a state that the world’s laws should already have corrected and would have corrected, were it not for the unique and deeply unusual circumstances of the soul it was sharing the space with.

The boy’s soul was the only reason the world had not already moved to snuff out the error of Dark’s presence here as the aberration it fundamentally was.

That window was not infinite.

Dark’s grip tightened another fraction, the blade steady, his deep eyes fixed on the revolting mass across the stillness of the mirror surface.

He was beyond anything Envy could genuinely threaten, and that remained true, but beyond did not mean invulnerable, and the clock that had been running since the coffin opened was not running in his favor, so it was about time he ended this battle.

Dark drew a visible breath. The sword hummed in response, a low resonance that moved through the blade from hilt to tip and back again, the sound less heard than felt, as though the weapon had its own opinion about what was coming and was registering agreement with the decision that had been made.

Dark lunged forward.

Envy moved in the same instant, the serpentine lower body propelling the entire abominable mass forward with a speed that was wrong for something of its bulk and construction, the scales of the armored snake driving it across the mirror surface in a straight, committed line.

Its neck swelled as it came, inflating with the rapid, grotesque urgency of something building pressure toward a release, its multi-eyed face contorting around the preparation.

"CROAAKKKKK"

The screech that tore from the inhuman mouth was not a sound that belonged in any space that had ever been organized around coherent laws.

It hit the air, and the air became something else, the space around the point of impact taking on a sickly greenish-black hue that spread outward in a wave from the source, reality itself discoloring under the pressure of the noise the way fabric discolors under heat.

It struck Dark as a shockwave, the sound, the force, and the wrongness of it all arriving simultaneously rather than in sequence, making Dark’s obsidian skin begin to peel.

Blisters rose across the exposed surfaces, the flesh beneath reacting to something that had no physical component, responding to an attack that operated on a level the body was not designed to interface with through conventional resistance.

The damage was real, immediate, and visible.

And then it was suppressed. Not healed like before, just suppressed, as if recognizing it did not belong in that being, the authority Dark carried, reaching into the damage and deciding it did not have permission to exist in the form it had chosen to take.

In the span of a breath, the surface was close to what it had been, but the damage remained.

The next attack came in the same instant, the serrated teeth of the long blade finding the edge of the obsidian sword.

The collision produced sparks, and the shockwave that washed outward from the meeting of the two edges scoured the reality around them clean, stripping the greenish-black hue from the air and replacing it with the corona of the impact itself.

Yet even though the blade was stopped, a long laceration opened from Dark’s shoulder down to his waist, opening the obsidian skin and letting a streak of dark blood well upward from the gap, thick and slow.

The muscle beneath hardened immediately, clamping down on the wound with the reflexive efficiency of a body that had learned to manage this kind of damage, stopping the blood before it could become a flow.