The frigid air crackled with tension as Koll’s eyes widened, staring into the abyss of Revant’s palm. Ti stretched like pulled taffy—a heartbeat that felt like an eternity.
Then Koll smiled.
It was a razor-thin expression, devoid of warmth, carved from pure malice.
"You think I’m so common prey to be devoured?"
His form flickered, becoming translucent as smoke, and Revant’s hand passed through empty air. Koll rematerialized ten ters away, his pale fingers dancing through complex gestures.
"That was just the appetizer."
The ice beneath their feet began to crack and splinter, not from force, but as if reality itself were fracturing. Dark veins spread across the frozen surface like a spider’s web, and from each crack erged not swords this ti, but chains—obsidian links that writhed with their own malevolent life.
Revant’s expression didn’t change, but his stance shifted almost imperceptibly. The mouth in his palm snapped shut with an audible click.
His voice carried the weight of winter itself.
"How pedestrian."
The chains lashed out with serpentine precision, seeking to bind Revant’s limbs, but he moved like liquid rcury. Each chain that should have wrapped around him instead passed through his form as if he were made of mist. Yet when he struck back, his fists were solid as mountains, sending shockwaves through the air.
Koll’s smile faltered.
Revant’s left hand remained bare, fingers flexing with predatory intent, while his right stayed gloved. He lunged forward, and this ti there was no elegant dance—just brutal, overwhelming speed.
But Koll had one more card to play.
His onyx-black eyes flared, and suddenly the battlefield wasn’t just ice and snow anymore. Shadows began to peel away from every surface—from the scattered ice shards, from their own bodies, from the very air itself. The shadows rose like a tide, converging around Koll until he stood within a writhing cocoon of darkness.
"Let’s see how you handle this, broken tyrant."
The shadow cocoon exploded outward, and where one Koll had stood, now there were dozens. Each shadow-clone moved with identical precision, identical malice, identical killing intent.
From their aerial perch, Thalen gripped Eli’s feathers tighter.
"This is escalating beyond what I anticipated. Shouldn’t we intervene?"
Eli’s golden eyes tracked the battle below with predatory focus.
"As much as I want to dive in and end this quickly, I don’t think we can."
Thalen frowned, curiosity etched across his features.
"What do you an?"
"From nine o’clock, I can sense monsters closing in on the ice land, and from the way I can’t gauge its rank, I’d wager it’s at least a Leviathan."
Just as Eli spoke, Raven launched into the air from below, flying with ferocious speed away from the ice land.
Eli chuckled, a sound like wind through stone.
"Looks like the girl has caught on too. We have our work cut out for us, buddy. Perhaps, with two Paragons and one Ascendant, we can take down a Leviathan—that’s a pipe dream, but hey, can’t a man be a little ambitious?!"
Eli flapped his wings with a powerful gale of wind and banked sharply. With a low screech, he vanished into the distance.
Below, Revant stood surrounded by the army of shadow-Kolls, each one wielding chains that glead like obsidian starlight. His head tilted slightly, the only sign of what might have been amusent.
He raised both hands—left bare, right still gloved—and for the first ti, genuine nace radiated from his form like heat from a forge.
"I suppose I’ll have to get serious after all."
The temperature plumted another twenty degrees in an instant, and even as they flew away from the center of the battle, Thalen and Eli could feel the oppressive weight of whatever power Revant was about to unleash.
The air itself seed to thicken, becoming viscous with an emotion so pure and concentrated it was almost tangible—a living thing that breathed despair into every molecule.
Despair.
Not the gentle lancholy of lost love or the sharp sting of failure—this was despair distilled to its absolute essence, weaponized and given flesh.
It rolled outward from Revant like a tsunami of hopelessness, crashing against everything in its path. The shadow-clones of Koll began to waver, their forms losing cohesion as the crushing weight of absolute futility pressed against them like an iron fist.
One by one, they dissolved back into wisps of darkness, unable to maintain their existence in the face of such overwhelming bleakness.
But Koll himself remained standing.
His true form, the original, stood motionless at the center of the dissipating shadows. His pale skin had taken on an almost translucent quality, and dark veins were visible beneath the surface like a network of midnight rivers mapping his mortality. Yet his onyx-black eyes burned with defiant fire that refused to be snuffed out.
"Impressive."
Koll whispered, his voice carrying despite the oppressive atmosphere that sought to smother all sound.
"I can feel it—the weight of ten thousand broken dreams, the echo of every heart that ever stopped beating from sheer hopelessness. I never thought a broken tyrant like you would still be able to wield his tyranny to such a staggering degree."
Koll grinned.
"But you forget sothing..."
He took a step forward, and the ice beneath his foot cracked—not from force, but from the sheer intensity of his will pushing back against Revant’s influence like a blade cutting through silk.
"I was born in despair. Forged in it. While you beca its master, I beca its child."
Another step. The despair that should have crushed him seed to flow around him instead, like water around a stone worn smooth by countless storms.
"You wield despair as a weapon..."
Koll continued, his smile returning—sharper now, more dangerous, like a predator baring its fangs.
"But I am despair. Every breath I’ve ever taken has been stolen from the cruelty of the universe. Every heartbeat is a defiance of the nothingness that should have claid long ago."
Revant’s expression flickered—the first crack in his impassive facade.
Koll raised his hand, and from his fingertips erged not chains or shadows, but sothing far more primal. Threads of pure entropy began to weave themselves into existence, each one a strand of unmaking, of undoing—the fundantal force that whispers to all things that they should not be.
"So let’s see, Tyrant of Despair."
Koll’s voice dropped to a whisper that sohow carried the weight of collapsing stars.
"What happens when despair ets its own reflection?"
The threads lashed out, and where they touched the air, reality seed to fray at the edges like fabric coming undone. This wasn’t magic or technique—this was sothing older, deeper. The raw force of negation itself, given purpose and direction by a mind that had never known anything but the dark.
For the first ti in centuries, Revant took a step backward.
His voice nearly shook.
"You... you are a Tyrant of Reflection."
Koll grinned like death itself.
"Damn right I am... but you got one part wrong—only half of is a Tyrant."
Koll lunged.
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