By degrees, Yariel steadied; as he became more used to sight, he regained his ability to navigate the environment once more. "Yeah. Like I said, I set everything up. Lots of contingencies. You kill me, you become the next Infinite King; pretty straightforward." Standing up more straightly, he took a deep breath, then let it out in a slow exhale; bending down, he began to put his shoes back on. "Okay, what next... we did physical combat, then spells... done with rhetoric... let me see..."

Topher sat down on the bed again, his head in his hands. Comprehension, loathsome and anathematic, still reverberated throughout him like a shockwave breaking and re-breaking his bones; he knew what would come next. "There has to be another way," he groaned to Yariel. "You can still stop all this."

"There's not. I checked everything three times." Lacing his shoes tightly, the ageless young man stood up again and stared out at the mesh of portals once more; Topher wasn't sure if it was his imagination, but he thought the vast span of the world below was a little closer now, and the horror of the encroaching doom ran down his spine like a saw blade. "So let's just wrap this up." He turned, facing Topher, and nodded, his hands empty and listless at his sides. "Whenever you're ready."

Topher didn't want to do this -- didn't want to do any of this -- but he knew he had no choice. He could see, with repulsive clarity, exactly how everything had been laid out: he couldn't surrender, couldn't bend, couldn't break. And worst of all, he couldn't forgive; knowing exactly how awful the condemnation Yariel labored under was did nothing to exculpate him from his responsibility in all the deaths. Everything had been set up from the beginning to channel and trap him, limiting his options until none remained; and so, powerlessly, he glanced at one of the suspended plates. The merest of glimpses was enough to do the job; so puissant were the runes and glyphs thereupon that he was trancing before he knew it. Like an unfolding fan, the Metaphrastic realm expanded around the two of them; but unlike his battle with Kelfir, this time it was silvery instead of golden, cold instead of warm.

"Personally," Yariel commented, "I think this is my second-best shot to kill you; your Wyrd is a Metaphrastic construct, so my chances to unbind it are superior here compared to anywhere else. Also, all my stats are infinite, so it'll be hard for you to find a weak point in my Status." He slid one foot forward, hands at the ready, and made a beckoning gesture to Topher. "So you can go first."

Topher didn't bother to respond, and couldn't have if he wanted to; the complexity, the depth, of everything around him was drowning and overwhelming him. The magic was so thick here that it was nearly solid; he felt like he was being buried beneath an avalanche of runes and nodes, of paths and vectors and aspects and congruencies. And even that was merely the apéritif to the main course; the boundless, unfathomable reconditeness of Yariel himself was so overwhelming that it blew everything else away. Directly exposed as he was to the other man's quintessence, he could perceive with acuminous exactitude the full scope of his puissance; his might, his sagacity, and his incisive intellect were only the surface atop a variegated and nuanced well of experiences and harrowings which threatened to eclipse his own self-concept utterly. He flailed, weak and effectless, before it; like a black hole, it blotted out everything else, becoming his entire perspective. Worse, within the depths of his incomparable surfeitude, Topher could glimpse the savaged, shackled humanity of a teenage boy who'd taken an impossibly heavy burden upon himself -- purposely winnowing and truncating his own emotions and choices until nothing remained but a mummified sliver of a deeply broken heart, unable to save everyone but feeling every loss incredibly keenly. The tragedy and pathos of it submerged him, hammering him down into himself like looking upwards into a Niagra Falls of unshed tears. He was lost, completely mastered almost before the battle even began.

Almost.

Dimly, with the feeblest of embers, his old spark of rage began to kindle; fostered securely within the lex animus at the core of his mind and self, it flickered and flapped against the infinite wind of Yariel's will, but could not be extinguished. And, inch by tortuous inch, he recovered himself; he remembered the black, hateful killing intent that had overthrown Kelfir. He remembered the gentle, indefatigable amnesty which had allowed him to integrate his own dark side; he recalled, shuddering with the memory, how he had almost been consumed and obliterated by the soul-echoes of both Vashyarl and Irineth -- each impossibly vast in their ponderous, inhuman complicacy. And Yariel dwarfed them both; they were as nothing before him, and Topher in turn was less than nothing, an insignificant speck upon an insignificant speck before the majesty of his adulterine divinity. But still, he could not be reduced; for, as pitifully incommensurate as he was, there was a unity and a strength in his smallness which rendered him noumenal in his own right. And from that basis, he could define a field upon which he could stand against the Infinite King; painstakingly, like a man building a mansion out of matchsticks, he reclaimed himself by degrees. And at the end of it, a thousand-year odyssey taking place in less than the blink of an eye, he recovered himself; standing before Yariel's sempiternal salience, he glowered upwards into infinity and spat defiance.

The response was swift and devastating; Yariel, with limitless ease, levied every manner of spiritual voluminousness imaginable in a myriad of arrangements and configurations, all fractally intertwined with impossible artistry and precision. He trampled over Topher's ipseity with supernovae of authority and agency; confounded him with riddles and stratagems, exposed every ounce of his stupidity and foolishness to an exacting degree. But each time, Topher found the appropriate defense within himself; he met strength with weakness, mastery with humility, and scorn with acceptance. And, parry by parry, he built a tomb for them both out of negations and denials; brick by brick, he assembled a postulate of equality which circumscribed and delineated them both. Carved with severity from the bones of their congruities, the ineluctable apothegm took form with inexorable purpose around them as they were brought into consonance. Impossibly vast, and yet small beyond measure -- limitlessly differentiated and yet inescapably analogous -- they faced each other, unimaginably far apart and yet close enough for discomfort.

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"That was impressively quick," Yariel marveled. "I barely even got a glimpse at your Wyrd's metastructure before you pulled that off." He turned away in the null-space, taking in the constructed reality around them; the shimmering, manifold boundaries of Metaphrastic reality had been approximated away into derivatives of a blank, dull whiteness. "Cantor's diagonal argument?"

"Yeah," Topher admitted. "Hana taught it to me. 'Some infinities are bigger than other infinities'; take the scale that defines, map us both onto it, and we're equivalent."

"Inventive," Yariel agreed. He walked in a small circle, thinking, then turned back to Topher placidly. "But if we're both cut off from our aspects and properties, we can't really oppose each other; and you can't afford to stalemate me with the moon already entering the surface gravity well. Time might pass more slowly in here, but it is still passing; if this is your plan, it won't work."

"It's the first part of my plan," Topher clarified. "This is the second."

With momentous abruptness, he raised his right hand and punched the other man in the face.

Yariel staggered back, surprised; but his face was smooth and unblemished, and he shook his head in apparent disappointment. "That won't work either. All my Attributes are infinite, including my Strength and Constitution; and even if they weren't, I can't take Damage."

Instead of answering, Topher met his disdain with a one-two combo of jabs; the blows thumped home, startling but ineffectual, and Yariel merely blinked with incomprehension. "You poor sonofabitch," Topher sighed, levying a trio of body-blows into the other man's slender midsection. "You're already losing, and you don't even know it."

Yariel frowned; annoyed, he raised a hand to bat away Topher's strikes. "Asserting that doesn't actually harm me, Topher."

"You still haven't figured it out," Topher grunted, hammering home a rapid four-count of noiseless impacts into the Infinite King's face; bewildered, he stumbled back a step, glancing around for hidden threats. "You aren't your Attributes, especially not here; they've been abstracted away. All that remains is you -- the core you, the real you. And I'm betting you never actually trained your body, did you?"

Slowly, with painful ponderousness, understanding crept like frost across Yariel's countenance; one by one, the facts proliferated, and he faced Topher with something less than supreme confidence for the very first time. "You are bluf-"

At that instant, Topher threw his first real punch; the sickening crack of bone on bone reverberated with shocking loudness across the silent expanse of the enclosure. Yariel's head rocked back, spraying blood from one nostril; he blinked repeatedly, holding up a shaking hand before his face. "How...?"

Brutally, Topher grabbed him around his throat and slammed him to the floor; with ease born of too much practice, he clambered atop the other man and pinned his arms beneath his knees. "I almost feel sorry for you," he grunted, punctuating each word with a vicious blow to a vulnerable spot; Yariel choked and gasped as pain flooded his consciousness for the first time in a century. "Imagine waiting a hundred years to see, then getting a guy's thumb shoved in your eye," he commented even as he demonstrated it; Yariel's agonized scream echoed throughout the un-space like a violin sustaining a high note.

"You are right about one thing, though," he commented, wrapping one fist around the other man's throat and squeezing it in an iron grip as his free hand rained blow after blow upon the Infinite King's face; "I can't actually reduce your HP this way. Strangling you feels pretty great, but you won't actually die; you'll just feel like you're dying. But your mind can still feel pain; and, eventually, it'll be so broken you'll tell me what I want to know. Or maybe I'll just cripple your mind so badly that your heart stops beating; it can happen, you know." Mercilessly, he kept on beating the smaller man's face, blow after blow after blow; screams dwindled to gurgles, and before long only the monotonous sound of flesh impacting against flesh could be heard for what subjectively counted as long minutes.

Then, with a sigh, Topher stopped; he sagged back, looking up at the nothingness in what might charitably be called above them both. "But this still won't be enough, will it? You're so scared of me finding something out that you're willing to die -- willing to risk everything you've done and suffered for, everything you butchered little children for -- rather than risk me even getting a hint."

Wearily, he climbed off the other man's prone, bloody carcass; falling to one side, he sat, watching Yariel's chest rise and fall with precarious and jerky unevenness. "But you made one mistake." He crossed his arms and looked down at the broken body before him. "You said it was something to do with my Skill. And there's no better place for me to understand myself."

Yariel twitched, gagged; weakly, he groped towards Topher as his shattered, tooth-askew mouth formed the word No. Then, his endurance failed him; the ageless young man's transcendent eyes glazed over, and he flopped to one side and panted dumbly for breath as the pain of his asomatous injuries rendered him temporarily insensate. Topher sighed, hoping it would last long enough to give him time to do what he had to do next; and, dreading what he would find, he sat down and closed his eyes. The null-space surrounded them both, blocking out the outside world completely; in here, they were all that could be perceived.

With a brief effort, Topher resected the space an additional layer; Yariel's body faded slightly as a translucent mist separated them, and the inchoate pressure of his presence eased against Topher's psyche. Now he was completely alone; utterly and solipsistically solitary. He breathed; his hands clenched involuntarily, then smoothed out along his thighs.

Finally and completely, Topher stopped running and looked himself in the eye.