His right hand caught Nightbreaker as it returned, the weapon slamming into his grip with enough force to make the internal supports in his arm protest.

He barely cared. Pride had not dodged the little spell. He had not blocked it either. He had simply allowed it to happen because it was beneath consideration. A tiny thing, meaningless by damage, enormous by implication.

"What is the meaning of these foolish acts? They serve no point in this... battle."

Pride’s voice carried a faint break before the last word, not hesitation exactly, but distaste. As if calling this a battle while Ludwig was flicking weak fire at his face offended some sacred definition.

"Oh, but they do," Ludwig said, already gathering another pathetic little flame. "You couldn’t dodge it. Something that small."

"It is insignificant, unimportant, not worth the effort to dodge or block. It simply washes away."

Pride answered with the perfect certainty of someone explaining gravity to a child. His golden eyes remained fixed on Ludwig, and his hand lowered with deliberate slowness, as if to prove how little the spell had mattered.

He was right, of course. Physically, it meant nothing. But Ludwig had not survived this long by only caring about physical effects. Minds had seams too. Even divine arrogance had joints.

Ludwig flicked another one at his face. Pride didn’t dodge it either.

"Is that so?"

Ludwig continued flicking more and more meaningless spells. The second weak flame struck Pride near the jaw and vanished harmlessly.

The third splashed against his brow. The fourth scattered over one eye and broke apart into useless sparks

Ludwig kept his movements casual, almost lazy, each flick of his armored fingers carrying the same vulgar little disrespect.

The spells cost practically nothing compared to the massive expenditure of Wrath roaring through Noctivex, and that made them perfect. Cheap, stupid, irritating, and beneath dignity. Exactly the kind of ammunition Pride had no framework for.

"Stop this."

The last one struck right into his mouth.

The timing was accidental in execution but perfect in spirit. A tiny flicker of fire slipped between Pride’s parted lips as he spoke, splashing harmlessly inside and bursting into a faint puff of heat and sparks.

It did no damage. It could not possibly do damage. But the arena felt the change before Pride fully showed it. The golden stillness around him tightened, and for a moment, his immaculate mask of superiority did not know what shape to take.

There it was. A shift. The one Ludwig was looking for.

Ludwig knew anger would be hard to impose on something like Pride. Pride thought himself far above anything that should bother him.

That was the trick of it. He did not believe in being provoked, because provocation implied equality in the insult.

To be angered by something beneath you was to admit it could reach you.

To dodge something insignificant was to admit it mattered enough to avoid.

To block it was to give it the dignity of response.

Pride’s own nature had trapped him in a ridiculous little corner where tiny flames could touch him because avoiding them would be, in his mind, a concession.

Well, that was until you became petty.

Ludwig had never considered pettiness a combat discipline before, but the results were promising.

A man with a mace the size of a tree, wearing living wrath armor, flicking candle-fire at a divine golden tyrant’s face like a bored child annoying a nobleman from across a dinner table. It was stupid.

It was ugly. It was effective.

And Wrath was in the room. No matter how small, how insignificant, Wrath was still wrath. Even tiny irritations could bloat into full enraged fury.

Each little flame was not just heat. It was insult wrapped in Wrath, a tiny drop of contempt flung repeatedly at something that believed itself untouchable.

"You try to anger this self," Pride said. "It is pointless. And I have humored you enough."

His tone remained controlled, but the control had become visible, and visible control was already a kind of loss. The air around him shifted, golden pressure thickening until dust trembled over the floor.

Ludwig felt the arena responding to Pride’s will, not as a crushing command this time, but as restoration, as correction. Of course. He didn’t like the battlefield ugly. He didn’t like the pattern broken. He wanted the stage repaired before continuing, because apparently even murder required proper aesthetics.

The hall trembled and changed. Broken tiles flew back to where they had been, cracks and fissures sealing themselves as if erased from the memory of the room. Marble slabs dragged themselves down from jagged angles and locked into place.

Gold reattached to the walls in smooth sheets, and shattered mirrors lifted their fragments from the ground, each piece returning to its frame with hundreds of tiny clicks. The trenches Pride’s heels had carved vanished. The scars from Ludwig’s impact disappeared. The palace restored itself with offensive grace.

"You’ve bemused yourself enough," Pride said.

He levitated until he was a few inches above Ludwig, just enough for Ludwig to look slightly up and for Pride to look down.

The movement was deliberate enough to be petty in return, and Ludwig almost respected that. Almost. Pride positioned himself not far above, not high enough to become distant, only enough to restore the angle he preferred. Ludwig’s helm had to tilt upward by the smallest amount to meet his gaze. That small adjustment was the whole point.

Pride pushed his hand forward and snapped once.

"Perish."

The snap was soft, almost delicate, but the command inside it made the air lock in place. Ludwig braced instinctively, expecting the world’s pressure to crash down again, expecting that suffocating authority to try to fold him into the floor.

His knees bent, Noctivex anchored him, and Wrath surged through the seams of his armor. Nightbreaker came up, not fully, but enough to guard.

The pressure never arrived the way Ludwig expected.

Instead, every weapon and suit of armor in the hall rose.

At first, it was a whisper of metal shifting against display stands, then a scrape, then a chorus. Swords pulled themselves from ornamental racks. Spears lifted from the walls. Shields rose from golden mounts.

Bows bent without hands. Armor that had stood as decoration along the edges of the hall straightened as if waking from a long, polished sleep. Ludwig’s red-tinted vision widened behind the helm as the palace’s treasures stopped being scenery and became an arsenal.

Rust vanished. Decay and fracture disappeared. What remained was pristine weaponry floating in the air.

Corrosion peeled away in golden dust, cracks knitted closed, dull edges sharpened until the air seemed to hum around them. Blades aligned overhead in glittering rows. Spearheads angled downward. Arrowheads turned toward Ludwig with the quiet patience of executioners.

Armors stood next to Pride with shields raised and swords drawn, while spears, bows, and arrows aimed toward Ludwig. Empty suits stepped into position around him, shields overlapping in a disciplined wall, swords held ready with eerie precision.

They did not breathe.

They did not hesitate. They existed only as extensions of Pride’s will, polished and perfect, because even his minions apparently needed to look like they had been cleaned by a royal obsessive.

"Golden Vault. Rain Down."

The upper lip of Ludwig’s mouth twitched. It was such an absurdly clean name for such an unfair amount of murder. He had just learned that Pride could be irritated, could be made to misread, could be forced into changing the battlefield. Wonderful. Excellent. Valuable data. And in return Pride had decided to animate the entire hall’s decorative murder collection and throw it all at him. Fair exchange, obviously. Very balanced.

"Ah... this is a bit unfair, no..."

Ludwig barely had time to finish the words before the first wave descended. Spears screamed through the air, arrows became lines of gold, swords spun with lethal precision, and the armored guards around Pride locked their shields tighter as if protecting him from even the idea of consequence.

Ludwig began to move, Nightbreaker rising, Noctivex flaring, Wrath trying to answer the incoming storm with raw force. But the entire hall had become an execution mechanism, and every direction he could choose had already been filled with blades.

And then the world turned black.

[You Died.]

***

Ludwig’s eyes snapped open as cold mountain air rushed into his lungs. For a moment, he remained seated on the stone staircase, his gaze fixed upward at the massive gates of the domed palace.

The sting of death still lingered in his neck where Pride had twisted it moments ago, though the sensation faded quickly beneath the familiar numbness of resurrection.

He didn’t turn to Undeath this time either.

So he realized that when Pride Killed him, it was a done deal. And he’ll find himself here. He didn’t pay the cost in souls but he had a feeling that Pride would remember all that humiliation.

Ludwig laughed.

It started low, almost as an involuntary breath escaping him, before growing into something rougher and more amused.

He leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms against his knees as his mind replayed the previous exchange in obsessive detail.

He had it wrong from the beginning.

Not entirely, but enough to matter.

Up until now, Ludwig had been treating Pride like every other monstrous thing the world had thrown at him, some absurdly overpowered enemy whose mechanics needed to be deciphered through repeated deaths until a weakness revealed itself. But Pride was not functioning like Wrath, Lust, Envy or the countless other abominations Ludwig had fought before.

Pride was structure.

A pattern so rigid and complete that it barely qualified as combat.

Ludwig slowly pushed himself to his feet, grabbing Nightbreaker by its handle and letting the massive weapon rest against his shoulder.

"That’s why you feel so damn weird," he muttered.

Everything about Pride made more sense now. The repeated dialogue. The mechanical responses. The identical movements across multiple encounters. Even the way his authority operated no longer felt like some impossible random bullshit designed to screw Ludwig over personally. Pride was not improvising, reacting, or creatively engaging with the battlefield in any meaningful way.

He was processing.

Every action Ludwig took entered some internal framework and received what Pride considered the correct response.

The moment Ludwig behaved within expectation, Pride appeared untouchable.

The moment Ludwig introduced something inefficient, irrational, or structurally unpleasant, that certainty was forced to bend around it.

And that bending was visible.

Small, but visible.

Ludwig’s grin widened.

That was enough.

He did not need Pride to bleed. He did not need to overpower him, outscale him, or somehow develop a miracle counter to whatever absurd authority nonsense this bastard was using.

He only needed to keep feeding him contradictions.

Not random nonsense. That would be useless.

Deliberate ugliness.

Bad decisions. Broken rhythms. Incomplete actions. Things that made no sense inside a framework built around correctness.

Things Pride would be forced to account for.

Ludwig adjusted his grip around Nightbreaker and began climbing the staircase again, his pace noticeably lighter than before.

For the first time since entering this domain, he was no longer walking toward another meaningless death.

He was walking toward a hypothesis.

A very violent one.

By the time he reached the gate, Ludwig was already smiling.

"Alright then," he said, pressing both palms against the metal doors. "Let’s see how much nonsense perfection can tolerate before it starts falling apart."

The gates groaned open once more.

Ludwig stepped inside.

***

Ludwig stepped through the palace gates once more, and this time the difference was immediate.

Not within the arena itself, as the domed amphitheater remained as suffocatingly pristine as ever, the fractured marble already restored to impossible perfection and the mountains of treasure once again arranged like discarded clutter around the central floor.

The difference came entirely from Ludwig.

There was no Noctivex wrapped around his body, no towering armor of living metal or crimson crystalline growths radiating wrathful energy through the chamber.

He entered in his ordinary state, carrying only Nightbreaker over one shoulder as though he had arrived for an entirely different encounter than the one Pride had likely anticipated.

Pride noticed.

His golden eyes lingered on Ludwig longer than usual.

Ludwig had already seen enough of Pride to understand that raw power was not what made him dangerous.

Power could be measured, categorized, and responded to.

It was structure that defined Pride, and Ludwig had no intention of giving him a structure to comfortably inhabit.

"You return still," Pride said, his voice resonating through the amphitheater with the same melodic certainty as before, though Ludwig now found himself listening more closely to what lay beneath it. "Do you not yet perceive the futility of your efforts?"

Ludwig continued walking across the marble as if he had not been addressed at all.

His pace was steady, unhurried, his boots producing a soft rhythmic click against the polished floor.

When he finally stopped, it was not because he had reached an optimal fighting distance or because he was preparing to engage, but simply because he felt like standing there.

"That depends," Ludwig replied, shifting Nightbreaker slightly against his shoulder. "Do you?"