"You should not have this power, young one."
Corvus floated opposite the throne with his siphoning haze drawn tight around him. It stayed close to the skin, a dark grey field held under tight leash rather than released at range. The Architect's eyes had fixed on it the moment he entered, which suited Corvus perfectly. Let him recognise what he had done and try to figure out how.
"Yet I do."
"I did not give you enough of my essence for it to manifest. You should not have this power."
Corvus tilted his head by a fraction. "Tell me, Thanatos. Now that I have it, what will you do? Call the elders. Try to subdue me. Or will you choose coexistence and acknowledge me as your equal for now and your superior soon enough?"
The question landed, and the room changed before the Architect moved. Pressure built in every stone of Purgatory. The air thickened. The low pulse of the realm sharpened into intent, and Corvus let it come. This was necessary; he needed the measurement. He wanted to know exactly where the balance stood between an underling Architect in his own realm and himself.
Thanatos answered with force.
The aura of death rolled out from him in a silent black tide. It did not rush like fire or explode like ordinary magic. It advanced with the certainty of rot finding a wound. The fog spread across the throne room floor and then rose, darker than the abyss, hungry enough that the very light around it looked thinner.
Corvus released his own.
The difference showed itself at once. His field spread in dark grey, leaner, sharper, and more controlled. Thanatos was heavier, a black fog thick with depth and destructive hunger. When the two met, the clash was not sound or flame. It was appetite grinding against appetite.
Thanatos's fog attached first, and Corvus felt it pull at him, not at the flesh but at the immortal life threaded through the soul. It was trying to devour him.
Corvus smiled and let his tendrils answer.
They lashed from his back in a black storm of their own, not drifting nor decorative. They were his intent gone feral. Thanatos raised both hands and blocked the first three with open palms. The impact cracked through the chamber like timber splitting. Corvus sent more at once, not in a single line but from alternating angles meant to force the Architect into reaction.
At the same time, blue and violet lightning started dancing around his arms.
The newly leashed power answered gladly.
Lightning crawled over his skin and thickened along the tendrils, turning them from shadow limbs into black cords edged in stormlight. Before he could release the first strike, Thanatos's hand snapped out and caught one tendril in an iron grip.
"I never liked these."
The drain hit instantly, and life started leaving Corvus through the captured tendril, pulled out of him with ruthless efficiency.
Corvus did not panic. He activated Extreme Speed and Agility, then shifted.
The throne room blurred as he crossed the distance in a single violent line and drove his heel into Thanatos's chest with all the force he had.
The kick landed like a meteor.
Thanatos left the air and flew backwards across the room. Black fog tore loose behind him. Corvus did not pause to admire it. The tendrils chased the body before it crashed.
Three struck first and sank into Thanatos' chest with wet, satisfying sounds that did more for Corvus's understanding than any speech could have. Blood and bone. The Architect was not a concept. He was not some untouchable abstraction wearing death as a costume. He was made of matter and essence together, just like every other thing that could be broken if enough force was applied the right way.
Corvus took back what had been stolen through the captured tendril and more besides.
Vital force flooded along the line into him, followed by the first ragged scraps of memory. Thanatos's chest became a vault.
Corvus tightened the drain and then unleashed the lightning. Thick arcs struck Thanatos's body one after another, forced through the air with no courtesy toward the space between. The first blast tore a scream out of the Architect. The second lit the throne room in white and blue flashes. The third exploded against his shoulder and blew pieces of blackened cloth and pale flesh into the air.
For the first time, Corvus heard the scream of pain from the mouth of death.
A moment later, the room flashed black, and Thanatos rose again with his own leeching haze deepening until it stopped being fog and became something closer to a moving absence. Tendrils forced out of his chest as the realm itself started to support him against Corvus. His hood fell. Beneath it was a pale face with no hair, pitch-black eyes, and a mouth locked in a sneer made uglier by genuine pain.
"You dare."
The growl carried outrage and very little dignity. "You dare to attack death, you miserable welp."
Purgatory answered him, and the whole realm pressed down on Corvus at once.
His feet struck the stone, for he no longer had the option of floating. The pressure multiplied with each heartbeat; the realm would have ground him to dust if not for his own regeneration and immortality.
Corvus turned at once to Elemental Mastery.
Fire formed first, then ice, then stone pulled straight from the floor and walls, getting shaped while floating towards him, spears, sharp enough to bleed Thanatos. Lightning threaded through all of it. He shaped them into javelins and sent them with devastating speed toward Thanatos's face, throat, and chest in alternating patterns meant to deny a single answer.
At the same time, the floor changed, and stone softened into molten rock around the Architect's position, rose upward in rough humanoid forms, and reached for him with grasping arms of lava and cooling basalt. Thanatos tore through the first two with his black haze, but the third got an arm around his leg and dragged him lower by inches before Corvus shattered it himself and sent the debris into the Architect's face at bullet force.
The pressure of Purgatory kept increasing.
Even with Extreme Speed, Corvus could not remain in a prolonged exchange forever. Thanatos was not a fighter in the ordinary sense. He never needed to be. He was using the Purgatory itself as a weapon.
Corvus adjusted.
He doubts the wizarding spells would have any effect here. Instead, mastery over elements, immense physical force and Soul damage were the correct routes.
He jumped forward with conjured blades in both hands, thin black weapons edged with lightning. Thanatos met him halfway. They crossed once, twice. The blades struck arms, ribs, and sides. The first impacts did almost nothing. Not even a drop of blood. Not enough force or penetration. The Architect was resisting his attacks without any effort.
As expected, Corvus used the crossing to test anyway.
"Avada Kedavra."
Green light slammed into Thanatos's chest and dispersed like rain on armour.
"Crucio."
The second curse landed harder and still failed to do anything worth the magic it cost.
That confirmed it. Spells that relied on mortal rules had no authority here.
Corvus dropped the blades and changed methods in the same motion. His fist drove into Thanatos's throat. A tendril punched toward the left eye. Lightning burst point-blank across the Architect's ribs. Thanatos answered by seizing two tendrils at once and trying to siphon what little damage Corvus did to him.
Corvus let him try.
Then, Psychic Mastery hit, and he drove it not into the Thanatos' mind like mental drills; the immediate pause of the black fog gave Corvus a room to breathe. Thanatos staggered half a beat, and that was enough for Corvus to rip the stolen life back and more through the tendrils embedded into the chest of the Architect. He immediately layered Necromantic Mastery over the same opening.
Soul Rend went in clean.
Thanatos jerked as if a hook had been dragged through his spine from the inside. Crimson blood sprayed from his mouth for the first time since the start of this exchange. One hand clawed at empty air before finding balance again.
It hurt him, not enough to end the fight, but enough to matter. Corvus did not let the opening die. He drove another kick into Thanatos's chest and sent him crashing to the far end of the throne room. Before the Architect could rise fully, Corvus followed and cast at point-blank range.
"Veritas Essentia."
The spell hit Thanatos from only inches away.
For one thin perfect instant, the Architect's soul pattern opened in spherical lines around him, revealing something precious for Corvus. The structures overlapped too densely to take all of it, but Corvus did take what he could. He memorised everything while every second stretched under extreme speed and agility.
Purgatory pushed harder, and his grey haze was losing ground against Thanatos's black fog now. The age difference, authority over the Purgatory and sheer potency were clear as day. Corvus felt the realm grinding at him, trying to slow him and strip momentum in a room built for death.
Another kick landed, and Thanatos flew backwards into the wall hard enough to crack the stone.
This time, Corvus did not follow.
He turned and shot through the side opening into the nearest storage hall.
Thanatos understood the direction instantly.
His fury changed shape.
The pressure in the realm spiked. Doors slammed. Arrays tried to lock. Corridors constricted by fractions. Purgatory was attempting to close around its harvest, but it had not been built against the Architects. The realm could not differentiate the intruder as clearly. It was different from commanding its power against Corvus than barring entrance to the vaults.
He hit the vault room and found what he wanted: philosopher's stones in thousands, stacked for centuries deep.
He opened folds of space and started to empty the room by the handful. Stones vanished faster than any ordinary theft spell could have tracked. Red pulses disappeared in batches. The room grew lighter as its treasures vanished. They went nowhere Purgatory could reach.
Half the vault was gone before Thanatos arrived.
The Architect came through the doorway like a wound in the room, black fog pressing ahead of him, pressure high enough now to turn lesser beings to powder. His face had lost all pretence of detachment.
When he saw the emptied room, his rage sharpened into something cleaner and more dangerous.
He moved the realm again.
The floor broke under Corvus in crushing waves. Walls tried to fold inward. The room screamed in vibration as the structure fought to preserve itself.
Corvus turned, looked directly at Thanatos, and smirked.
He had had enough, and a portal was already opening behind him.
"Till we meet again, Thanatos."
He stepped backwards through the opening.
The portal collapsed at once.
The last thing he heard before it sealed completely was the roar of an ancient being who had just watched thousands of years of harvest disappear into the hands of something he had dismissed as a welp.