Chapter 792: Not All That Shines Is Gold
"I NEED NO SUCH THING AS HOPE!" Pride howled. The words ripped through the collapsing palace, shaking fractured mirrors in their frames. It was not calm anymore. Not polished. Not superior. It was loud, furious, defensive. And to Ludwig, standing beneath that storm of golden light and shattered authority, it sounded like the sweetest thing Pride could have possibly said.
The final crack in the mirror, the one Ludwig needed to finalize this absurdly long fight. It was not in the palace walls, nor in the dome, nor in the endless reflective surfaces Pride had used to turn his existence into worship. It was in Pride himself. In that howl. In the contradiction burning behind those golden eyes. A perfect being should not need hope. A perfect being should not reject needing it with rage. A perfect being should not need to answer the accusation at all.
Months he spent on this tower, closing on a year. And now the conclusion was right here. The deaths, the returns, the experiments, the scraps of information bought with broken necks and shattered limbs, all of it had led to this moment. Not a glorious heroic charge. Not a clean victory earned by strength. Just a battered undead who had annoyed, tested, provoked, and philosophically bullied a godlike Sin into exposing the contradiction that mattered.
And it came with the rage that Pride had finally allowed to takeover. The golden aura around him flared violently, no longer smooth and radiant, but jagged, pulsing, unstable. The floor beneath his feet cracked in thin spiderweb patterns, and the remaining mirrors reflected a version of Pride that no longer looked above the world. He looked furious inside it. Alive inside it. Limited by it.
Pride was infallible.
Pride’s defense was not just power. It was coherence. As long as he remained aligned with his own absolute belief, nothing could properly reach him. But contradiction created space. And through that space, everything else could finally bite.
Pride whipped his hand forward, a javelin shot up toward Ludwig’s face. The weapon tore out of the golden light like judgment itself, long and narrow, burning with the same authority that had rejected spells, blades, curses, and rebellion. It crossed the distance in an instant, aimed directly at Ludwig’s skull.
In another case, another scenario, another battle, Ludwig would have simply dodged.
"Noctivex! Arm!" Ludwig shouted as he saw the golden javelin shooting toward him.
Immediate, Noctivex coated Ludwig’s right arm in plated baleful armor, to which he threw forward, and gripped the incoming spear. Black plates snapped over his forearm and hand, pulsing with dull crimson light. His fingers closed around the javelin’s shaft just before it reached his face, and the impact drove his boots backward across the floor in two deep scars.
Sparks flared out as the power of the spear wanted to rip Ludwig’s arm off, but the reinforcement made by Noctivex allowed him to hold. The javelin screamed in his grip, golden force grinding against black metal. His arm felt like it was being pulled apart from the inside, muscle, bone, and Noctivex all arguing violently about which one should fail first. Ludwig clenched his jaw and held on.
Without hesitation, Ludwig took the very force behind the spear and spun around with it, twirling the javelin once, then once it was in control he turned toward Pride, "Perish!" The movement was brutal, not elegant. He did not stop the javelin’s momentum so much as steal it, redirecting the power through his shoulder and torso before shoving it back along a new path. The golden weapon blurred around him once, its light smearing across the ruined palace, then shot back toward its creator.
"I don-" Pride raised his hand forward to block the weapon. The motion was instinctive, absolute, the same casual rejection he had used throughout the fight. His palm opened as if the javelin was merely another unworthy attack, another thing that should stop because Pride declared it stopped.
Only for Ludwig to stab right through his opened palm.
The sound was small compared to the destruction that had filled the hall before, but it struck louder in Ludwig’s mind than any explosion. Flesh parted. Golden light split. The javelin passed through Pride’s hand as if the rejection had never existed, then drove straight into his chest. Not a single ounce of resistance left.
Pride looked at Ludwig, with eyes wide opened, surprise clear on his face. It was not a twitch this time. Not a microscopic delay. Not a tiny narrowing of the eyes. This was open. Naked. Unmistakable. Pride stared at him with genuine surprise, and the expression looked more fatal than the javelin in his chest.
"H-how?"
"Your own vanity, was your own downfall, Pride. Stuff you influence are the only things that can kill you... I couldn’t have known that if your Pride didn’t falter..." Ludwig’s voice came out low, tired, and sharpened by satisfaction. He had not beaten Pride with superior force. He had beaten him with the shape of his own rule. Pride’s influenced weapon. Pride’s contradiction. Pride’s rage. All of it folded back on him.
[-1Hp]
Golden blood dripped down Pride’s wrist first.
Thick.
Viscous.
Radiant.
For a brief moment, it retained that impossible metallic luster Ludwig had come to associate with the being before him.
Then the color changed.
The gold dulled.
Brightness drained from it in real time, warmth and divinity peeling away like a lie being forcibly corrected. What slid down Pride’s fingers afterward was no longer liquid metal masquerading as blood.
It was red.
Ordinary.
Human.
Pride stared at it.
Not at Ludwig.
Not at the wound.
At the blood.
His expression shifted in a way Ludwig had not thought possible.
Not fear.
Fear implied survival still mattered.
This was something deeper.
Recognition.
The kind one arrives at only when an abstract truth finally acquires physical evidence.
The golden sheen coating his skin began to recede next.
It did not shatter or explode away dramatically. It simply... withdrew.
As if the world no longer felt obligated to maintain the illusion.
Gold faded from fingertips first, then palms, forearms, throat, jawline. Perfect metallic luster gave way to ordinary flesh tone in uneven waves until what stood before Ludwig no longer resembled an untouchable sovereign carved from divine material.
With the pale weakness of something mortal.
Something breakable.
He looked like a man.
A dying one.
"You finally see it, don’t you?" Ludwig said. His words were quieter now. He took a step closer, watching Pride’s body shake around the javelin. The Sin who had looked down on everything now struggled to remain upright under his own weight.
Ludwig moved carefully, one arm supporting Pride as the golden light continued to fade from his skin. He lowered Pride carefully onto the fractured marble.
Not out of pity.
Pity would have been insulting.
And not out of affection, because there had never been anything remotely resembling that between them.
But after everything, after the countless deaths, contradictions, and failures required to arrive here, allowing Pride to collapse like discarded trash felt strangely inappropriate.
A difficult enemy deserved at least the dignity of gravity
It would have been easy to throw him down. Easy to laugh. Easy to repay a fraction of the humiliation, pain, and death Pride had handed him.
But the moment did not ask for that. He didn’t deserve that.
Pride taught Ludwig something. The lesson had been brutal, absurd, and paid for in deaths, but it was still a lesson. Vanity and power all comes to an end. Eventually. Even something that claimed perfection could be cornered by its own reflection.
Ludwig let go of the javelin and looked down on Pride. The crown that used to hover over his head made a soft sound as it struck the marble, then rolled in a lazy curve before settling against a crack near his boot. Without it, Pride looked smaller. Not weak exactly, not ordinary, but less staged.
"You were a good fight. Unlike Wrath, and Envy, those two were dicks. They caused too much harm. You don’t strike me as someone who is... benevolent nor malevolent. I suppose that’s what Pride is. Above all mortal expressions." Ludwig looked down at him while he spoke, his tone carrying a weary bluntness. Wrath had been ruin. Envy had been poison. Pride had been different. Cruel in his superiority, yes, but not ravenous. More like a mountain that believed everything below existed only because it permitted the view.
Ludwig sat down next to the bleeding pride who gasped for air.
Like a mortal.
The sound filled the silence between them, ragged and wet, somehow more unsettling than all of Pride’s previous declarations. A being who had spoken like law now struggled with breath. Ludwig rested his arms over his knees and stared across the ruined palace.
"Don’t get me wrong, I’m not feeling pity toward you, you’re much greater than someone feeling pity for. But, you crossed Necros. You got to enjoy an immortal life rejecting death." Ludwig’s voice remained calm, but there was iron beneath it. Pity felt too small for Pride, too insulting even now. But consequence was not pity. Death was not pity. Necros’s domain had been crossed.
"You... are... nothing but Necros’s hunting dog..." Pride said. The words came broken, each pause shaped by pain and blood. Even dying, he still found a way to place Ludwig beneath something. Beneath Necros. Beneath purpose. Beneath the hand that sent him.
"Maybe," Ludwig sighed. There was no point denying it completely. He had been used by Necros, guided by Necros, pushed through quests and impossible deaths because the Lord of Death had taken an interest in him. Hunting dog was crude, but Ludwig had been called worse by things less interesting.
"You don’t understand Necros... you don’t get it... you too will eventually perish..."
"That is the fate of all..."
"Undead... your very existence is a transgression. After you are done with slaying all the sins... do you expect Necros to allow you existence?" Pride’s voice thinned, but the words landed. Ludwig did not move for a moment. The ruined palace seemed to listen with him. Undeath was contradiction. Necros guarded death. Ludwig existed between rules that should have swallowed him already.
"We made a deal..."
"A deal... huh...Then you are more foolish than I assumed. The deal better be worth it... Undead...You bargain with inevitability and believe yourself exceptional..." Pride replied as his eyes began closing. The last word came out like both insult and warning, dragged through blood and failing breath. His eyelids lowered slowly, the remaining glow in them dimming by degrees.
Ludwig sighed as he looked around him. All the gold, all the mirrors began changing alongside Pride’s change. The golden weapons rusted over, some shattered immediately, some turned to dust and brine. Some became ash. Blades that had floated like divine judgment fell apart before touching the floor. Shields cracked and collapsed inward. The mirrors clouded first, then fractured, then lost their reflections entirely.
The dome above them was suddenly turned to fleeting particles that flew along the winds of the mountain they were on, even the marbled door.
The palace peeled away from existence piece by piece, no longer sustained by the belief that had shaped it. Marble faded into dust. Golden walls thinned into drifting motes. Wind pushed through spaces where impossible architecture had stood, cold and real, carrying the scent of mountain stone instead of polished grandeur.
"To think that everything here, was merely a figment of Pride’s power... quite frightening..." Ludwig muttered. The words barely rose above the wind. If Pride’s manifestation could create a palace this real, then the Sins were not merely enemies with personalities. They were laws wearing bodies. And Ludwig had just killed one by making that law contradict itself.
Another one down... four more to go...
Ludwig looked up,
A slew of notifications soon showed up in front of Ludwig.
