Pride's palm caught Rehan's fist a mere inch from the King's skull.
The impact detonated outward in a silent ring of black-gold shockwaves, and for the first time all battle, Rehan felt actual resistance — not pain, not damage, but a wall of absolute, unmovable ego that simply refused to yield, refused to acknowledge the possibility of loss.
"You misunderstand what I am," Pride said, voice smooth, layered, ancient. "The others were fragments of sin. I am the frame that held them all together. I am the reason a broken demon lord ever believed he deserved to become a King."
Its crowned head tilted toward the gasping Scarlet King behind it.
"And I will not let his story end kneeling."
Pride's form began to swell, absorbing the drifting crimson ash of its six fallen siblings — Sloth's stillness, Greed's hunger, Wrath's fury, Envy's jealousy, Gluttony's appetite, Lust's temptation, all of it folding back into Pride's chest in a final, desperate act of consolidation. Its crown split into seven points of light. Its silhouette doubled in size, wreathed now in the combined, concentrated essence of everything it had once commanded.
"One Sin, wearing the weight of seven," Pride intoned. "Let's see if your fists remember how to fail."
It struck.
The blow caught Rehan clean across the chest, and this time he moved — thrown backward through the vacuum for the first time all fight, black-gold blood spraying in a wide crimson arc behind him before he caught himself, boots skidding against nothing, aura flaring violently to arrest his momentum.
Behind Pride, the Scarlet King dragged himself upright, laughing weakly, deliriously, blood bubbling at his lips. "There it is," he wheezed. "There's the opening I needed."
He raised his glaive with both trembling hands, and the last of Scarlet's stolen godhood poured entirely into the blade — every drop of divinity he had left, no longer held in reserve, no longer rationed for survival. The weapon ignited into a spear of pure, condensed crimson starlight, humming with enough contained force to crack a planet in half.
"Pride buys me one strike," the King said, voice steadying now, certain, final. "One strike is all a King ever needed."
Rehan straightened out of his skid, wiping blood from his lip, his golden-emerald eyes narrowing — not with fear, but with the flat recognition of a man watching an opponent commit everything to a single, all-or-nothing gamble.
"Then throw it," Rehan said quietly. "Because after this, there won't be a second chance for either of us."
Pride lunged again to buy the King time, its swollen, seven-fold form colliding with Rehan in a final, desperate clash of light and shadow — and behind that collision, the Scarlet King drew back his glowing spear, aimed it directly at Rehan's exposed heart, and hurled it with every last fragment of stolen divinity he possessed.
The crimson spear tore through the vacuum of space itself, screaming with the combined death-cry of a devoured goddess and a desperate king's final hope —
— and struck true.