Once Ludwig walked through the portal, he found himself in front of a massive gate. The shift was so abrupt it made his balance stutter for a fraction of a step, one second he was stepping out of one world, the next, he was planted on stone that felt ancient and absolute. The air didn’t just feel cold. It had weight to it, like the kind of chill that creeps into armor seams and stays there, biting deeper the longer you pretend it isn’t happening.
His eyes tracked instinctively, left, right, behind, up, mapping exits before his brain even caught up to the fact that this was a place that wanted to be mapped. Every breath ca out faint and white, then vanished into cloud.
It was a mountain peak. Where only clouds covered the steep mountain slopes. The world beyond the ledge was just a rolling sea of gray, thick enough to swallow sound.
No birds. No distant wind howl. Just that muffled hush you get when you’re high enough that the world feels... far away from itself.
Even his boots sounded wrong, the stone under them too clean, too smooth, too prepared.
Behind him was a set of stairs that led to the unknown, and the door ahead of him was made of tal, carvings of warriors, of blood and battle, all reaching for one man, a man on a throne and a crown of thorns above his head.
The tal was warr than it should’ve been for a peak like this, warmth trapped under surface polish, like a fever hidden under skin. The carvings weren’t just decoration. The sculptor had forced desperation into every line: fingers clawing upward, mouths open in silent screams, bodies stacked in worship or collapse, hard to tell which. The throne at the center of it all looked like an altar built from conquest.
’Pride,’ Ludwig said. The word ca out quiet, but it didn’t feel small in his mouth. It tasted like a conclusion he’d been chewing for too long.
’I guess this is it. No trumpets. No dramatic reveal. Just a gate, a peak, and the faint sense that the next step would be one I can’t walk back from cleanly.’
Ludwig approached the gate of the massive golden dod palace. The gold didn’t shine like wealth. It shone like a warning. The do above the gate was massive enough that the mountain itself looked like it had been carved to accommodate it, as if nature had been forced to kneel and make room. He could feel eyes on him, not physical eyes, sothing closer to the Tower’s habit of watching.
And pressed his hands on it. The tal didn’t feel like tal. It felt like sothing pretending to be tal.
[Your Death Point has been saved.]
[Entrance of the Domain of Vanity and Pride.]
The words appeared with their usual indifference, as if this was just another door, another checkpoint, another step on a staircase that didn’t care who climbed it.
Ludwig felt his jaw tighten anyway. Death Point saved ant: you will die here. Not maybe. Not if. Just... when.
The tal gates groaned, a heavy, tectonic sound that vibrated through Ludwig’s boots as they swung inward.
The sound didn’t echo the way it should have in open air, it got swallowed, compressed, returned as a low hum that made his teeth feel too tight in his skull.
The transition was instantaneous. The biting mountain chill vanished, replaced by a stagnant, pressurized heat, the kind that gathers in a room where the air hasn’t moved in centuries. It wasn’t forge heat.
It was the heat of a sealed vault stuffed with things that had no business being kept.
As Ludwig stepped over the threshold, the "palace" revealed its true nature. It was not a collection of rooms, but a single, vast, circular Amphitheatre.
The first thing that hit him wasn’t the size, it was the silence inside the size. The sort of quiet that wasn’t absence of noise, but presence of control. The air here felt filtered through arrogance.
The floor was a polished expanse of white marble, so reflective it looked like walking on a frozen lake. His reflection stared back at him with a faint delay in the flicker of the light. The marble looked spotless, but it wasn’t. It was clean in the way sothing was clean after being scrubbed with intent.
Above, the massive golden do didn’t just cover the space; it seed to trap the light, magnifying it until the entire arena glowed with a sickly, opulent amber.
The glow didn’t feel natural. It felt curated, light arranged the way a tyrant arranged people, the way a collector arranged trophies. Ludwig’s shadow ca out sharp and wrong under it, like it belonged to soone else.
Sprawled across the floor were mountains of gold, not neatly stacked, but tossed aside like common trash. Ancient coins, jeweled chalices, and silken banners lay in chaotic heaps, forming a shoreline of greed around the central combat floor.
So of the coins were stamped with faces Ludwig didn’t recognize, older than this empire, older than the nas he’d learned. So chalices were cracked, as if they’d been crushed in a hand that didn’t respect them. The silk didn’t rot. It shouldn’t have survived in a place like this. Which ant it was being kept like everything else.
The walls were lined with towering mirrors of obsidian and silver. But they didn’t just reflect the room; they were frad by the "trophies" of those who had co before.
Cracked shields of legendary heroes, shattered staves of great mages, and rusted swords were mounted like hunting prizes. Each trophy was etched with the na of the loser, a testant to a thousand failed ambitions.
Ludwig’s eyes skimd over the nas without lingering, because lingering ant giving them weight, and this place was built to feed on weight. So nas were carved deep, angry. So were thin and shaky, like whoever etched them had been forced to do it while bleeding.
There was no wind here. No birds. Only the rhythmic, tallic clink of Ludwig’s own gear echoing off the gold.
Even that sound felt like it offended the arena, like the room was irritated that sothing imperfect had dared add noise to it.
He heard his own breathing, then realized sothing worse: the do amplified that too, turning his breath into proof that he still functioned.
From the center of the arena, where the light from the do converged into a single blinding pillar, a figure began to rise from a throne of jagged glass.
The glass looked like it had once been sothing else, mirror fragnts, weapon shards, polished into cruelty. The throne didn’t look built. It looked ford by pressure and certainty.
As the light dimd, the entity stepped forward. It was a being beyond the binary of man or woman, possessing the broad, powerful shoulders of a warrior and the lithe, elegant grace of a dancer. Its skin didn’t just catch the light; it seed to be cast from liquid gold, shimring with a tallic luster that suggested flesh harder than any forged steel. Ludwig felt his instincts reach for classifications, enemy, monster, usurper, then fail to anchor. The entity didn’t fit.
It was entirely naked, yet it didn’t seem exposed. It wore its lack of armor as the ultimate insult, a silent declaration that nothing in existence was capable of marking its skin. Its face was a terrifying harmony of beauty and strength, eyes glowing with the cold, distant light of a star that considers the world beneath it to be nothing more than dust. Those eyes weren’t angry. They weren’t even amused. They were certain. Like the concept of losing had never been installed in its mind.
The only thing it "wore" was the crown. It didn’t sit on the head so much as hover a fraction of an inch above it, a circle of blackened gold that cast a shadow over those divine features. The shadow didn’t behave like normal shadow. It looked thicker, as if it had mass. As if that crown was not decoration, but a rule.
The being stopped several yards from Ludwig. It didn’t take a combat stance. It simply stood there, chin tilted upward, looking down at Ludwig not as an enemy, but as an annoying insect that had dared to crawl onto a masterpiece. Ludwig felt the distance like a line drawn in the floor. Not a "safe distance." A "you are allowed to exist here distance."
"You have walked a long way," the being said, its voice a lodic resonance that felt like it was vibrating inside Ludwig’s own skull. It wasn’t loud, yet Ludwig heard it perfectly, like the sound had permission to bypass air. The words didn’t feel like greeting. They felt like assessnt.
Ludwig looked at its eyes for a second, those golden eyes felt like they didn’t owe the world anything. Almost the opposite. Like the world owed them, and had been paying for a long ti.
It wasn’t sheer arrogance, but sothing else... Sothing Ludwig has yet to fully understand or realize. Arrogance was noisy. This was quiet. This was the calm of sothing that didn’t need to prove itself because proof was for lesser beings.
"You are moving," the being finally said. His voice wasn’t a roar or a sneer; it was a flat statent of fact, like water acknowledging a leak. The sentence landed like a verdict. Ludwig beca painfully aware of his own weight shifting on his feet, of the tiny adjustnts his body made just to stand.
"You are breathing. You are sweating. You are trying to beco sothing. That you are not..." Pride’s gaze slid down Ludwig like a blade scraping armor. Ludwig could feel the words tugging at him, not emotionally, structurally. Like the Tower’s language had hooks in his muscles. He hated that. He hated anything that tried to tell him what he was.
The being finally turned his head. It was a slow, chanical movent, the only movent he had made in perhaps a century. His eyes were not filled with hate, but with a terrifying, hollow pity. That pity was worse than contempt. Contempt could be challenged. Pity ant the challenger wasn’t even acknowledged as capable of being dangerous.
"How exhausting it must be," Pride continued, his gaze drifting over Ludwig’s scars and gear. "To be so... unfinished. You are a draft that should have been burned. You are a process that refuses to conclude." Each phrase felt like it was ant to press Ludwig into his own history, every death, every restart, every ti he’d clawed forward.
Ludwig’s jaw tightened hard enough that his teeth ached. He could feel the urge to snap back with violence, but sothing in the air suggested violence here didn’t start with blades.
"That’s a lot of pointless stuff you’re saying... so, we’re fighting or na?" Ludwig’s tone ca out blunt the way he preferred, because if he gave this thing an inch of polite conversation, it would take a mile of control. He kept Durandal low, not threatening, but ready. His shoulders were loose. His mind wasn’t.
"Fight? What reason could ever compel to even bother with entities as insignificant as you?" Pride didn’t even shift stance when he said it. The words weren’t a taunt. They were an observation. Ludwig felt the arena respond, mirrors humming faintly, trophies catching light a fraction brighter, as if the room itself agreed.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t even raise his hand. He simply existed with such absolute certainty that the space around Ludwig began to feel thin, as if reality itself were trying to delete the "error" The air near Ludwig’s skin prickled, like static before lightning. His shadow on the marble looked wrong again, blurred at the edges, like it wanted to detach and leave him behind.
’Sothing’s not right.’ Ludwig’s thought wasn’t fear. It was pattern recognition. Lust had been overwhelming. Wrath had been violent. Gluttony had been indifferent. This? This felt like a law, not a creature.
"I don’t need to end you... You shall end your own existence. For you are...incomplete." The last word dropped like a stone into a still pond. The marble under Ludwig’s boots seed to accept it. The mirrors didn’t reflect him cleanly anymore; his outline wavered for a heartbeat, like the room was considering whether Ludwig deserved a stable shape.
And they judged, and they were unfair in their judgnt.
Prejudicial.
[You Died.]
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