’Missing sothing?’
Revant suspected—in fact, very much knew—that he was. While he wanted to believe that Koll was a Tyrant of Nullification, Koll was simply too weak to be one.
Moreover, Revant had once t the Tyrant of Nullification, and Koll wasn’t him. This led him to conclude that Koll was a Tyrant of Reflection—a conclusion solidified when he saw Koll wield his own tyranny as if it were his own.
There had to be a trick to it. Besides Koll being a Tyrant of Reflection, sothing else was slipping through his fingers. Reflection, after all, was a razor’s edge between Origination and Tyranny. Could Koll be both a Tyrant and an Origin?
Revant growled at such a wild idea. It was simply impossible.
He had little ti to react before Koll caught him in a vise.
The mont Koll moved, the world fractured along invisible lines.
His form split—not into shadow-clones this ti, but into sothing far more fundantal. Half of him remained corporeal, flesh and bone moving with deadly grace, while the other half beca pure negation, a void-shaped wound in reality that devoured light itself.
Revant’s eyes widened as Koll closed the distance—the first genuine emotion to cross his features since the battle began.
"Impossible. A dual-natured being?"
Koll grinned viciously.
"I prefer the term ’paradox.’"
The corporeal half of Koll struck first, chains erupting from the ice to bind Revant’s limbs. But it was the void-half that proved truly terrifying.
Where it passed, Revant’s despair aura didn’t just weaken—it ceased to exist entirely, as if the concept of hopelessness itself was being deleted from reality.
Revant’s right hand twitched toward his glove.
"Don’t."
Koll warned, his dual voice carrying absolute certainty.
"Whatever you keep hidden under there, I can simply unmake it. You’ve never faced an opponent who could negate your very existence, have you?"
For a heartbeat, Revant stood paralyzed—not by fear, but by the alien sensation of encountering sothing beyond his experience. Then his lips curved into the ghost of a smile.
"You’re right. I haven’t."
He raised both hands—left still bare, right gloved—and pressed them together as if in prayer.
"Which is precisely why this will be interesting."
The temperature didn’t drop this ti. Instead, sothing far more unsettling happened—the air began to forget what cold was. Not warmth, not heat, but the complete absence of the concept of temperature. The ice beneath their feet remained solid, but lost all understanding of what frozen ant.
Revant murmured, his voice now carrying its own dual nature—the weight of despair layered beneath sothing that sounded almost like wonder.
Koll’s void-half wavered, confusion rippling through its non-substance. Sothing strange was happening, and it didn’t take long to figure out. His gaze darkened.
"Conceptual Erasure. Surely you wouldn’t use your ultimate form of tyranny. You could cease to exist. Are you that reckless?"
What Revant was doing was sothing every Tyrant was capable of. Every Tyrant, because of the Tyranny they governed, was given a unique law manipulation ability. It manifested in diverse ways according to the Tyranny they governed. And for Revant, he was simply trying to erase the frawork that allowed existence to have aning.
And Koll would not be able to unmake sothing that had already forgotten what it was supposed to be.
Revant grinned.
"I am that reckless. You’re just going to reflect whatever I throw at you anyway—fighting you is a headache. I’ll just destroy everything."
Koll’s gaze remained dark for a few monts, then he sighed and admitted.
"You are clever."
His corporeal form pulled back as his shadow-self struggled to process this new reality that Revant was birthing.
"But you’re still thinking too small."
He gestured, and the threads of entropy that had been weaving around him suddenly inverted. Instead of unmaking, they began to remake—but wrong, twisted, like reflections in a shattered mirror.
"I don’t just negate."
His voice was dominant, clinical and precise.
"I can correct the universe’s mistakes. And you, Revant, are a very large mistake."
The air around them began to shift, reality bending as Koll’s power worked to rewrite the fundantal laws governing their battlefield.
Where Revant erased concepts, Koll rewrote them entirely—cold beca liquid fire, solid beca gaseous thought, ti beca a direction you could walk sideways through.
Revant’s expression shifted from amusent to sothing approaching respect.
"You bastard... how many Tyrannies can you reflect?"
Koll grinned savagely.
"You’re beginning to understand the reality of your situation. Let give you a delicious detail—do you know that every Tyrant whose Tyranny I now reflect is long dead? Killing the Tyrant of the Tyranny gives overwhelming control over the reflection of their power."
Koll raised his chin.
"I’m going to enjoy killing you, but here’s another delicious detail—I haven’t only reflected Tyrants. Reflection is a very delicate and paradoxical nature, after all. Whether Origins or Tyrants, everyone has a reflection."
His grin deepened, the dual echo of his voice vibrating like two blades scraping against each other.
"Everyone casts a reflection. Even concepts. Even gods. Even... you."
Revant’s gaze sharpened, his mood visibly twisted with contempt.
Koll’s corporeal form’s chains slithered across the ice like serpents, while the void-half distorted with each step, bending the horizon itself.
"I’ve made a habit of eating things, Tyrant of Despair. I hope you don’t mind if I take a bite."
The battlefield groaned under their competing wills. The erasure Revant had birthed gnawed at the laws of existence, stripping away the idea of ’what is.’
But where the void advanced, shattered fragnts of stolen Tyrannies flickered—flas that bled sound, winds that carried mories, shadows that weighed like stone. Each was a grave marker of soone Koll had killed, yet each obeyed him with unnerving precision.
Revant tilted his head, his bare left hand flexing as if weighing the threads of reality.
"So you’ve been hunting them... for permanence of their reflection."
He softly sighed.
"Makes curious—why are you loyal to an Origin?"
Koll tilted his head.
"Loyal?"
He chuckled.
"The only thing I’m loyal to is my needs. Kryos is my greatest masterpiece."
A sudden lurch ran through Revant’s body—not physical, but conceptual. For an instant, he felt his own despair mirrored back at him, amplified into sothing alien. His vision fractured, as if staring into a mirror made of blades.
The mirrored despair twisted, mutating into sothing that was no longer Revant’s at all. It was heavier, colder—foreign—and it pressed into him like a second skin that didn’t fit.
Revant shuddered at the cold, helpless feeling of his own despair consuming him.
He had no ans of breaking free. His mind felt cold and bleak. The concept of hope had never existed in him, but Revant, despite holding an indifferent gaze, seed to crack inwardly in that mont.
Not because he was scared of dying—he wasn’t scared of anything.
It was just that with everything in him, Revant despised losing.
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