Shade turned his wrist. The roar turned into a gurgling choke. "That is enough." Marcus's voice flickered for an instant, soft and strained within the void of Shade's consciousness.

Shade ignored it. He twisted his arm deeper.

Gluttony slammed a hand onto the ground, steadying himself. "You think this is a victory? You sever fragments of my gluttony and expect me to yield?" His voice strained, but his smile returned, toothy and monstrous. "You are a delightful anomaly."

Shade tightened his grip and froze. Something tugged back. Though it wasn't Gluttony. It was something deeper. Something older. A pull like an abyss responding to another abyss.

Shade's eyes narrowed. "What are you hiding?"

Gluttony coughed out a laugh, even as his form continued dissolving. "If you consume the hunger of a universe, child, do you understand what that makes you?"

The ground shattered beneath them. The tendrils Shade had unleashed recoiled. Even the void dome trembled. Gluttony reached with his free hand and clasped Shade's wrist from within his own body.

"Let me show you."

Shade's instincts flared. In an instant, he severed his arm at the elbow, letting it disintegrate cleanly into shadow. Distance warped as he reappeared several kilometers away, the stump already regenerating.

Gluttony rose to full height once more. Most of his form had reconstituted. Shade calculated rapidly. He had wounded Gluttony, genuinely.

But Gluttony's recovery suggested there was far more beneath the surface than Marcus ever realized. The Sin wasn't merely a devourer; he was a gateway. A vessel. Or a prison.

Gluttony stretched casually, as if nothing had happened. "You are entertaining," he said. "But if you wished to end me, that was your moment."

Shade's voice deepened. "It wasn't an attempt to kill you. It was a warning."

"A warning," Gluttony repeated, amused. "For whom?"

Shade took a step forward. All shadows in the region snapped upright like soldiers at attention. "For the part of you," Shade said, "that even you fear."

It was the first time Gluttony's expression faltered. Shade caught it immediately. Good. Marcus stirred inside him again, weaker this time. Shade that's enough…

But Shade wasn't Marcus. And this battle was no longer about morality. It was about data. Discovery. Efficiency. Whatever it took to bring Gluttony down to his knees.

Gluttony inhaled deeply. The air around him distorted, as if gravity warped inwards toward his maw. "I am losing interest again," he said. "Fight seriously, little shadow. Or I will devour your entire essence, Marcus included."

Shade's head tilted. "Threats are unnecessary."

"No threat." Gluttony raised a hand. "A promise."

For the first time, Gluttony used a fraction of his true power. The world bent inward. The horizon curved. Space compressed like a vice.

Shade lifted a hand. Every shadow in existence bent toward him. The two forces met. The atmosphere cracked with an apocalyptic sound.

Gluttony's gravitational pull shredded mountains in the distance, corralling mass into a dense, crushing sphere around his palm.

Shade countered by dragging the night itself downward, turning the battlefield into a plane of absolute black. Light ceased. Sound died. Matter lost meaning.

The two titanic powers collided. A silent flash erupted, then reality buckled. When the distortion cleared, Gluttony stood unmoved. Shade, however, had one knee planted.

Not from weakness. From the calculation. Marcus's internal voice trembled. You're going to break the world…

Shade exhaled once. "Then let it break."

He rose, slow and deliberate. The sky dimmed further. The shadows swelled. And Gluttony smiled, slowly baring all his jagged teeth.

"At last," Gluttony whispered. "A worthy opponent."

Shade straightened fully, rolling his shoulders as if loosening some invisible restraint. The grin on his face remained fixed, knife-thin and hungry, but his eyes radiated a darkness that felt older than any mortal instinct.

Behind him, the battlefield warped under the pressure of his expanding domain. The remnants of color bled out of existence, leaving behind monochrome silhouettes that buckled as though resisting an overwhelming gravitational pull of pure shadow.

Shade inhaled deeply, almost serenely, letting the air rattle through his teeth. His voice was soft when he finally spoke, soft enough to be unsettling. "You think this is balance tipping. This," He gestured lazily to the collapsing terrain, "is me stretching."

Gluttony watched him with open intrigue, the jagged lines of his smile curling upward. He seemed delighted, almost proud, as if Shade's madness was a performance crafted solely for his amusement.

"Stretch further, little shadow," he rumbled. "Show me something even I have not consumed."

His massive form loomed closer, absorbing the debris caught in his gravitational wake. The ground itself tilted toward him, pulled into his orbit like unwilling prey.

Yet even with that monstrous force gathering strength, Gluttony did not attack. He was savoring the moment, anticipating what Shade would do when pushed past sanity and into something far more dangerous.

Shade began walking toward him, each step light, almost playful, but leaving behind craters of absolute black where his feet touched. His movements were sharp and unpredictable, twitchy in ways that betrayed something fundamentally fractured.

He tilted his head and addressed Gluttony with a manic glimmer. "You're excited," he whispered, sounding delighted by the observation. "You think you've finally met something worthy of chewing on." He paused, blinking slowly. "But you're confused. I'm not prey. I'm not even a predator." His grin widened impossibly. "I'm the knife that cuts the throat of both."

The shadows responded to his glee, swelling outward like a tidal wave of liquid night. Pillars of darkness rose from the earth, twisting and roiling as they formed towering humanoid shapes, faceless giants sculpted from Shade's own malice.

Their shoulders hunched forward as if waiting for a command. Shade looked at them as a conductor might regard an orchestra, and with a subtle flick of his hand, the constructs sprinted toward Gluttony, each step shaking the world.

They weren't meant to kill; they were meant to smother, overwhelm, dissect, and torment. The shadows were bountiful. They were of perfect quality and quantity, a better quality than most humans.

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