Rehan's fist connected with the Scarlet King's guard hard enough to send a ripple through the vacuum itself—light bending, silence turning briefly, impossibly, into a boom that had no medium to travel through and yet was felt in the bones anyway, a sovereign-authority phenomenon that ignored physics as easily as it ignored mercy.
The Scarlet King went spinning end over end, trailing sunset-colored blood that froze instantly into glittering crimson dust in the cold of open space.
But before Rehan could close the distance again, the King barked out a single, ragged word.
"Enough."
He slammed his glaive into the black void, and seven points of dark crimson light bloomed around him in a perfect circle—each one pulsing, expanding, until seven robed figures stood suspended in space at his back, their forms stitched together from shadow, sin, and stolen divinity.
"You didn't think," the Scarlet King rasped, wiping blood from his split lip, "that I devoured Scarlet's power for nothing, did you? A goddess doesn't just grant fire. She grants court."
Rehan's golden eyes swept over the seven newcomers, cataloguing each one with the flat, exhausted precision of a man who had stopped being surprised by anything the universe threw at him.
The first stepped forward—a gaunt, hollow-eyed figure whose very presence made Rehan's limbs feel leaden, drained, unwilling to move at full speed. "Sloth," it introduced itself, voice like dragging chains. "You've been fighting so hard, little Sovereign. Wouldn't you like to rest?"
The second unfurled behind it, a bloated silhouette with a hundred grasping arms, each clutching stolen treasures, stolen power, stolen light. "Greed," it hissed, "hungers for what you carry. That aura. That authority. Give it to me."
A third, wreathed in mirrors that reflected only Rehan's most furious, most broken moments back at him. "Wrath," it whispered with his own voice. "Let go. Stop holding back. Burn it all. I can feel how badly you want to."
The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh unfolded in turn—Envy wreathed in jealous green flame, Gluttony a swollen horror that fed on raw magic itself, Lust a seductive illusion built entirely from Rehan's most painful memories twisted into temptation, and finally Pride, standing tallest, crowned, silent, watching Rehan with cold, evaluating eyes.
"Seven sins," the Scarlet King said, retreating behind his new court with a satisfied, bloodied smile, "each one a fragment of divine corruption Scarlet carried inside her before I claimed her. Each one strong enough, alone, to have ended lesser gods. Let's see how your hundred percent handles eight of us at once."
Rehan didn't retreat. Didn't posture. He simply rolled his shoulders once, the golden-emerald flame around him thickening into something denser, heavier—light behaving like liquid metal now, dripping off his frame in slow, deliberate arcs.
"You gathered an army," Rehan said quietly, "because you're afraid to face me alone."
"I gathered an army," the King corrected, "because I'm smart."
"No." Rehan's eyes lifted, sweeping across all eight of them—King and court alike—with something that was no longer quite grief and no longer quite rage, but a terrible, settled calm that was somehow worse than either. "You gathered an army because some small part of you already knows how this ends if it's just you and me."
Sloth lunged first, moving with deceptive, sluggish-looking speed that closed the gap in an instant—
—and Rehan was already gone from where he'd been standing, appearing directly behind Sloth's back before the Sin even completed its swing.
"Rest," Rehan said softly, echoing its own mockery back at it, and drove his palm into its spine with enough force to scatter its shadow-form into drifting embers across the void.
One down. Six sins and a king remained.
Wrath's mirrors all screamed in unison, and the real battle began.