Benedict stumbled backward, his aristocratic composure crumbling like the corpse-littered street around them.
The silk napkin pressed to his nose did nothing to filter out the stench of death that now permeated every breath.
His eyes darted between the painted canvas and the horrific reality it had somehow birthed.
"This... this is madness," he whispered, his Victorian accent trembling with revulsion.
"The Grey Lotus do not stand with indiscriminate murder. We are better than this, better than the very monsters we fight against."
The Painter's white hair shifted slightly as he tilted his head, considering Benedict's words with the detached interest of a scientist observing an insect.
"I thought you were a gentleman," Benedict continued, his voice growing stronger with righteous fury. "A man of principle, of honor. But you're nothing more than a beast...every bit the monster they paint you to be."
The sound that escaped the Painter's lips was barely human.
A cold, mirthless laugh that seemed to leech warmth from the very air. It echoed off the silent buildings like the death rattle of hope itself.
"Good and evil," the Painter mused, his brush still dripping with crimson paint. "Such quaint concepts. Such... human delusions."
He turned slightly, revealing the sharp profile of his face beneath the cascade of bone-white hair. "There is no good or evil, Benedict. There are only those strong enough to seize power, and those too weak to prevent it from being taken."
Benedict's hand moved to his waistcoat, fingers closing around the familiar silk of his napkin.
As he drew it forth, tendrils of black smoke began to trail from its edges like liquid shadow given form. His features hardened into a mask of determination and disgust.
"We would not ally with such monster!" Benedict snarled.
He lunged forward with inhuman speed, his form blurring until it seemed he hadn't moved at all, simply materialized in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
The napkin in his hand writhed with dark energy, smoke coiling around his arm like a serpent preparing to strike.
The Painter was smiling.
The collision was brutal in its simplicity. The Painter's hand closed around Benedict's throat with casual precision, cutting off his charge mid-momentum.
For a moment, they hung suspended in the air, predator and prey locked in inevitable violence.
The painter waved his hand and the earth turned upside down. Benedict vomited as his entire body churned.
The painter grimaced at the scene as Benedict tried to wriggle out of his chokehold.
The Painter drove Benedict downward.
The impact shattered the street like glass. Concrete and asphalt exploded outward as Benedict's body carved a crater ten feet across into the earth.
Dust and debris rained down around them, settling over the fresh carnage like ash from a crematorium.
A single drop of blood escaped Benedict's lips, dark against his pale skin. The world being upside down made it hard for him to move.
"Don't bite off more than you can chew, S rank ," the Painter said conversationally, brushing dust from his black robes as he stepped out of the crater with fluid grace. "It's unbecoming of a gentleman."
Benedict lay sprawled at the bottom of the pit, his finery torn and bloodied. But his eyes, his eyes burned with a hatred that seemed to transcend mere mortality.
With trembling hands, he raised his thumb to his mouth and bit down hard enough to draw blood.
The crimson drops fell onto his napkin, and reality caught fire.
The silk ignited with flames that defied every law of nature, black fire edged with silver that consumed without heat, devoured without smoke.
The flames spread to Benedict's clothing, his skin, wrapping around him like a lover's embrace.
He was channeling his Negative Energy.
Within seconds, the entire crater blazed with eldritch fire that began to climb toward the street above.
The Painter paused in his departure, sighing with the weary patience of someone dealing with a particularly troublesome child.
"What a pain in the ass," he muttered, not bothering to turn around.
"DON'T YOU DARE TURN YOUR BACK ON ME!" Benedict's voice erupted from the flames with a roar.
His form burst upward from the crater, wreathed in black fire that turned the twilight air to plasma. He moved like a supernova given human shape.
A blink....
In that infinite span between one moment and the next, reality twisted.
Time stretched like taffy, each second an eternity of suspended motion.
Benedict hung frozen in mid-air, his flaming form captured in crystalline clarity as the Painter materialized directly in front of him.
"You're a waste of the four energies," the Painter said, his voice carrying the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence.
His crimson eyes held no malice, no anger, only the cold indifference of absolute power.
A single finger extended from beneath the black robes, touching Benedict's forehead with delicate precision.
The effect was immediate and horrifying. Benedict's flesh began to unravel at the molecular level, starting from the point of contact and spreading outward like ripples in a pond.
His scream cut through the air, not of pain, but of the existential terror of feeling oneself cease to exist one atom at a time.
"You were always too soft for the reality of this world," the Painter observed, watching with clinical detachment as Benedict's form dissolved into motes of light that scattered on the wind. "Such naivety should not exist."
The flames died with their creator, leaving only silence and the lingering stench of death.