Ahrimon let his words settle in the silence for a moment. Then he raised a single finger, a smile curling across his face that looked far closer to a snarl.

"How about a cure?" Ahrimon said, his voice laced with false generosity. "A cure for the Devourer curse. Not just one of your Guardians, or for a single clan, but for the entire Domain."

He watched Alex’s expression with patient attention, ready not only to enjoy his reaction, but to measure the true weight his offer carried.

The slight surprise that moved through Alex’s face was controlled quickly. Quickly enough to be a statement of its own kind.

"Or," Ahrimon followed, not allowing the moment to close before he had placed the second offer beside the first, "perhaps you would prefer saving your own world from that same misery."

The ripple that moved through Alex’s eyes at this was of a different quality entirely. Horror arrived first, the specific horror of someone who had considered a possibility in the abstract and suddenly found it being presented as something concrete and negotiable and therefore real in a way the abstract had not made it.

Denial followed immediately behind it, instinctive and fierce. And then, a breath later, both were replaced by the darkness that was Alex’s default, the calm that was not the absence of feeling but of pure discipline.

The silence that followed was long enough to be uncomfortable for everyone in the arena who was watching it, which was everyone in the arena.

"How about a package deal?" Ahrimon said, into the silence, with the tone of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment and found it perfect.

He did not pause to let the framing settle.

"I give you the name of the traitor currently operating within the ranks of the Domain Guardians." He held up one finger, then added a second. "Also, two names from among the clan leaders who have already aligned themselves with me, and will continue to do so in the future, regardless of what the next five years produce."

He acknowledged the obvious limitation before Alex could raise it.

"It’s a package deal; they would be largely useless to me for the duration of the ceasefire. Mostly useless, since they cannot act on my behalf and plunge the Domain into the flames of open war while the terms hold." He went quiet for a moment, and then his eyebrows rose in a way that was either the genuine arrival of an idea or a theatrical performance of the genuine arrival of an idea, and Alex was entirely certain which of the two it was.

"Third Offer," Ahrimon said, and his face shifted into an expression that sat somewhere between an evil snarl and the particular satisfaction of a being that had been building toward this specific moment and had arrived at it with everything intact, "you could have me make a promise on my very will to live."

He let the weight of those words exist in the air for a moment before he continued.

"To not destroy Earth."

A pause.

"Or even this accursed Ancient World."

He said the last words with the tone of someone offering to refrain from something that would greatly hurt even him, which was itself a statement about what he had always planned for the Ancient World.

The statement brought many reactions from the demons, but they were too afraid to question it, and Ahrimon was too unconcerned to bother hiding his true nature and intention.

"These promises," he said, his voice returning to something more conversational, more transactional, the voice of someone who had moved from the theatrical portion of the exchange into something more serious, "All five choices are available to you, each one at a cost of one year from the ceasefire you have so arranged."

He spread his hands, the gesture open and almost generous.

"And you need not decide today. You have four years from this meeting to make your selection, choosing whatever appeals to you." He smiled, the expression one of victory and vileness, "After that, all offers expire."

He held Alex’s gaze with those ancient, shifting, perpetually hungry eyes.

"I am surprised," Alex said, and the surprise was genuine enough that he allowed it to be visible for exactly the moment it existed before it passed. "But no, thank you."

He exhaled, a small and unhurried breath, and looked back at Ahrimon with the same cold, ruthless intensity that had been present in his eyes since he had stepped onto the arena floor. When he continued, the venom in his tone was not forced; it arrived naturally.

"And let me be clear about something else." His voice carried across the space between them with the particular quality of something being stated for the record rather than argued. "Do not give me a reason to sit at home and spend time with my family. Because if you break a single one of my demands, I will not return to this world for one year."

"And if you think doing more damage would force me, then you need to learn a lot about me," Alex smiled.

The implication did not need to be elaborated on. A year without Alex growing. It was the most cruel yet simple threat available to him, and they both knew it.

Ahrimon’s smile held for a moment.

Then it froze.

The stillness that replaced it was not the controlled stillness of something choosing to compose itself. It was the involuntary stillness of something that had received information it had not been prepared to receive, and was taking the fraction of a second required to verify the fact before deciding what to do with it.

Confusion arrived in his expression, and behind it, barely held in check by the immense will that contained everything Ahrimon was, genuine anger.

Not the performative anger of a king demonstrating displeasure for an audience. The real kind, the kind that came from somewhere deeper than theater and carried the weight of something that had just been genuinely surprised by the world and did not find the experience pleasant. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

He stared back at Alex with a questioning gaze that was, in itself, remarkable. Because Ahrimon did not ask questions with his eyes, he was not the type to show even a shred of weakness.

The reversal of that was something Alex had not seen before, and it surprised him in turn, not because he feared the anger but because he could not immediately identify its source.

He did not know what had produced that reaction.

"I rarely have things happen that I failed to see or consider," Ahrimon said, and the previous warmth and theatrical enjoyment had left his voice entirely, replaced by something stripped down and direct. "You, young man, have just done exactly that."

The genuine anger underneath it is visible now rather than contained, barely held in check by the force of a will that could move mountains if it chose to express itself as pressure.

His eyes held Alex’s with an intensity that had shed its earlier quality of patient amusement entirely.

"You have made things considerably more interesting." Something moved through his expression that was almost rueful, which was not an emotion Alex had ever associated with this face. "And I find myself regretting, even if only slightly, having given you five years to prepare."

He straightened in the throne of abyssal black, the movement carrying the quality of something drawing itself back to its full height after having momentarily allowed something else to be visible.

"We will meet on the red sand," he said, and the words arrived with a finality that closed every door in the conversation simultaneously, clean and absolute, the tone of something that had said what needed to be said and was finished with the exchange. "And we will see who earns the right to live."

Alex held his gaze for a moment and then let the conversation end.

He turned his attention inward as the arena’s ambient sounds began to reassert themselves around him, the collective breath of thousands of demons finding its way back to the surface after being held for longer than was comfortable.

Something had happened to one of the Sin Generals.

The realization arrived not as a conclusion he had reasoned toward but as something read directly from the emotional signatures of the two Sin Generals hidden in the folds of reality at the arena’s perimeter.

Their emotional states had shifted, and the quality of the shift was the same if not higher than when they discovered that Envy was dead. It was the shift of beings who had felt something close, something very significant, had just died.

’A Sin General died,’ Alex concluded, the certainty of it settling in him and bringing a storm of emotion alongside that fact.

’How?’ The question formed and remained unanswered, even Alex could not fathom how a Sin Genrel could be killed, he himself needed help from a particularly unique Ancient terror to accomplish the task.

He doubted that anything other than a Domain Guardian could achieve such a feat, and even then, it would come at the cost of their own life, since the suppressed curse in their beings would ravage them to a point of no return.

’Well,’ he thought, the consideration shifting into the rapid, economical evaluation of someone who had limited time and a great deal to weigh, ’Now what?’

Possibilities assembled and collapsed in quick succession.

Alex had come prepared with a way to give Ahrimon a taste of death, brief as it was, purely to make that bastard suffer the consequence for attacking his family.

But did he need it now?

He examined the full picture of where things stood. Envy and another Sin General were dead. That was not a small thing. That was two Sin Generals removed from the board, and the psychological weight of that loss, the disruption it would send through the structures Ahrimon had built and the plans he had laid, was already doing work that Alex did not need to add to directly.

Humiliating him further in front of his own people, crushing his overgrown ego, would be nice, but that also meant giving him a reason to be cautious of him, and while before it was worth it, to remove the burden he had carried for so long.

But now, after what Ahrimon had already suffered, he was not so sure.

’I will save it,’ Alex concluded, the decision arriving with the clean finality of something that had been examined properly and found to have only one reasonable answer. ’The death of two Sin Generals is already more than enough for today. Anything more tips the balance in the wrong direction.’

He had what he had come for.

Alex dissolved into the darkness, and he left the area and arrived at a secluded area, tucked away from any sight that might have followed him this far, and confirmed the absence of observation.

Then the purple runic glow of the continental teleportation array bloomed around him, the ancient geometric patterns inscribing themselves in the air with the patient, practiced certainty.