"Futile. Imperfect. Fallible. Vain."
Pride spoke each word with the same cold certainty he always carried, as though he were not insulting Ludwig but merely describing an obvious flaw in reality.
With every utterance, one of the countless suspended weapons hanging above the arena shot forward toward Ludwig.
Spears screamed through the air, axes rotated violently enough to distort the heat around their edges, and jagged swords came from angles designed less to kill quickly and more to make movement itself feel impossible.
Ludwig moved anyway. His boots scraped over fractured marble, blood slick beneath one heel and golden reflections flickering across broken stone.
He twisted his torso to avoid a spear aimed at his sternum, dipped under the horizontal sweep of a crescent blade, and kicked himself off fractured marble just as an axe crashed into the floor where his skull had been a moment prior.
