The realization, born from the perfect, warping, impossible physics of the illusory cottage, settled over Arthur like a shroud. Alyssara had not just refined Lysantra's power; she had surpassed her. This meant she was stronger than any single Demon Lord, stronger than the leaders of the Great Seven. The entire strategic framework of the world, the balance of power he had come to understand, was meaningless here. He was facing an entity who had, through theft and obsessive refinement, potentially become one of the most powerful beings in existence.
And she was toying with him in a magical dollhouse.
The "Emma" projection watched him, her head tilted, a gentle, knowing, pitying smile on her face as she sensed the dawning, paralyzing horror in his mind. The walls of the kitchen were still tilted at an absurd angle, and the gravity still stubbornly pulled him towards a wall. His Peak Radiant power, his connection to Harmony and The Grey, felt inert, conceptually checkmated. They were tools designed to function within a system of rules, and she was the author, editor, and publisher of every law in this space.
"You see, don't you, Arthur?" the Emma-projection whispered, her voice a soothing balm over his abject terror. "It's perfect here. There's no war. No responsibility. No failure. Just... us."
That, more than anything, broke his paralysis. The cold fury of his rejection in the last fantasy, the one he had shattered, returned. He would not be checkmated. He would not be her pet.
He pushed off the wall he was "standing" on, lunging through the disorienting space, his fist pulling back. He ignored the faulty sensory input, focused his intent, and drove a Grey-infused punch directly at her.
Alyssara didn't even flinch. The "Emma" projection simply smiled. As his fist traveled, the space between them stretched. Not like a visible warp, but subtly, conceptually. He was moving at full speed, yet his target, only a few feet away, seemed to recede, the distance between them becoming an elastic, unbeatable gulf. He was running through molasses, his Peak Radiant power struggling against her absolute, innate Reality Control.
Then, the gravity shifted again. "Down" became the ceiling. He was suddenly "falling" upwards, his lunge turned into a helpless tumble. He twisted, using Grey spatial manipulation to reorient, but it felt sluggish, like trying to swim through wet concrete. Her control was that absolute.
"Why do you struggle?" her voice echoed, now seeming to come from the crackling fireplace in the other room. "Why do you insist on this path? It only leads to pain."
He landed hard against the ceiling, the impact jarring his bones. Crimson threads, no longer playful, but thick as hawsers, erupted from the plaster, lashing around his limbs, binding him. He flared his power, a pulse of Grey negation vaporizing them instantly, but more took their place, a relentless, effortless tide.
He tore himself free, dropping back to the "floor" as gravity returned to normal, only for the floor itself to become insubstantial, forcing him to expend energy to keep from falling through into a grey void beneath. He was a rat in a maze designed by a bored god, a maze that rewrote its own walls every second.
He was being completely, effortlessly, humiliatingly overpowered. Every art he had spent two years refining, every technique he had mastered, was rendered clumsy and useless. His Grey Mist was dismissed by a thought. His Silent Cuts unraveled before they could form. His spatial folds were predicted and countered before he even initiated them. She was toying with him, yes, but she was also demonstrating, with crushing clarity, that his very best was nothing.
He was panting, not just from the physical exertion, but from the sheer mental strain of existing in a space that actively defied his every intent. He stood in the center of the warping room, his Peak Radiant aura flickering, struggling to maintain its integrity against her pervasive, divine presence.
The despair was no longer a creeping tendril; it was a suffocating shroud. This gap... it was impossible. He was a master, the pinnacle of the Radiant path. And he was being treated like a novice, a child.
His thoughts, as they always did in moments of profound, unbridgeable failure, turned to the impossible standard he carried, the ghost that lived in his name. The Original Arthur.
'He would have known what to do,' the thought was a bitter, corrosive self-indictment. 'He wouldn't be trapped in this... psychic dollhouse. He wouldn't be confused by shifting physics.'
Arthur tried to imagine the legend, the hero who had built an empire and faced down gods, in this same scenario. The image that formed in his mind was one of absolute, unwavering authority. 'OG Arthur wouldn't be defending,' his internal monologue whispered, laced with a familiar, toxic self-loathing. 'He would be dictating. His will was a force of nature. He would have imposed his own reality on this place. He would have seen through her games, shattered this conceptual prison with a single, focused application of his own will. He would have faced her, a god, as an equal.'
The comparison was a crushing weight. It amplified every failure, magnified every one of Alyssara's effortless counters. 'He would have been strong enough. He would have found a way. But I am not him. I am just a pale shadow, a flawed echo failing to live up to the legacy. And she knows it.'
That was the worst part. He looked at the Emma-projection, which was now sitting calmly in the armchair by the fire, watching him struggle as if he were a particularly frustrating piece of performance art. She knew. Her disappointment in him wasn't just a taunt; it was a genuine assessment. She had expected the legend, and she had gotten him instead.
This vortex of despair was the real prison. His power, tied to his will, his intent, began to flicker, destabilized by his own profound self-doubt.
Alyssara, or the "Emma" projection, smiled, sensing his internal spiral, the cracking of his resolve. "Yes," she purred, her voice dripping with a mix of pity and triumph. "You see it now, don't you? The futility. The gap. You could have been so much more, Arthur. You could have been him. But you settled. You burdened yourself with attachments, with sentiment."
She rose from the chair and glided towards him, the tilting, impossible room seeming to steady around her, her control absolute. "But do not despair. It is not too late. You cannot reach that height on your own. But I can give it to you. I can break you down, burn away the weakness, and remake you. I can forge you into the man you were always meant to be."
She stood before him, her hand reaching out, radiating an overwhelming, divine power. The illusory cottage dissolved, not violently, but fading away like a dream, the comforting warmth replaced by the cold, alien truth of the sanctum. She was done playing. Her hand, no longer Emma's, but her own, glowing with crimson light, moved towards his face. "Let me help you, Arthur," her true voice echoed, seductive and terrifying. "Let me help you shed this skin. Let me break the flawed copy and find the original beneath."
Her fingers brushed his temple. He was physically pinned by her reality control, his power suppressed, his mind lost in the suffocating shadow of the ghost he could never be. He was checkmated, trapped by an enemy who wielded his own deepest insecurities as her most potent weapon.