He near-stumbles out of the in-between realm of the one known as the Reaper, and onto the dirt of this material plane. The vertigo is dizzying, like he’s stepped off a cliff and gravity’s turned to catch the cliff’s face under his feet. It feels too big, too impossible to be real. Yet it is.
It kind of makes him want to pause to throw up. Eh. Maybe later. He’s kind of in the middle of something important right now. Fire and brimstone and smoke surrounds him, and he turns and looks at his extremely stunned enemy. Mephistopheles, Evil Archdevil with dramatic capitalization and everything, second only to Asmodeus in power in the planes of Lawful Evil. Currently boggling at Veron.
Yeah, me too, mate, thinks Veron.
The Archdevil of Cania opens his mouth to speak, to say something that’s probably villainous and clever and maybe even some flavor of charming. There’s likely supposed to be some epic climactic battle here or something, and he’s supposed to say some kind of witty and heroic one-liner before fighting for his life and learning the true meaning of his strength inside or whatever. He really, really does not care. Veron does not give a single shit. Not one. Let somewhere else have all of the theatrics and the dramatics, he's done.
“Shut up,” he interrupts venomously, and the word he says next is not quite a word at all. It’s a name. Mephistopheles’s name, but more fundamental than simple syllables. Addressing the thing that he is, not the thing he’s called by. It’s the sort of thing only something a step away from divinity could use properly, after lots of questing and fighting and daring to be crazy enough to fight through a very literal Hell to find and befriend the lost defeated soul that this Archdevil betrayed to earn his place by Asmodeus’s side. A display and leverage of power and the flash of something-like-a-blade that could certainly kill, at the source. Epic level bullshit, in short.
Mephistopheles shuts up.
“You’ve lost,” says Veron, and it’s a simple statement of fact. Any battles that would be fought here are pointless. A façade. Window dressing to the real battle between Good and Evil taking place. They could fight, and one of them could be defeated. A drop in an ocean, nothing more. Veron doesn’t think either of them would really be able to die here, much as he’d like to make this fucker stop existing forever.
(Much as he will, some part of him thinks, or maybe knows, make this fucker stop existing forever.)
The real battle was the one that took place in Cania. The power base that feeds this bastard’s power, the secrets he kept locked away in the ice. The rules he’d leveraged to depart from his fortress to try and take ground from the enemy. The open door and epic level rogue he’d left in his place. The human he’d thought would flinch and fail and fall when faced with all of the horrors of Hell, all of the injustice and inevitability, the unfathomable agony, the mind-bendingly large machine of brutally efficient torment. Then didn’t. It was, ultimately, a gamble. It is now very firmly lost. His power bleeds away from the newly gaping wound. The laws he wrote seal his failure. The evil he nurtures, fundamentally and irrevocably tainted, or maybe the better word is given hope, because that is there, now. Hope of escape. Hope of mercy. Hope of understanding of mistakes made. Hope of justice being an end to pain, not a cycle of it.
“Leave,” suggests the rogue. The word is a sprung trap. Mephistopheles can follow the suggestion, thereby acknowledging his power. Or, if he’s feeling daring, he can go double or nothing on this lost bet. He could test it. Maybe he’d win it all back, all of the lost ground and the lost power, from this pathetic and puny little mortal that dared to not die. Surely it’d be impossible for an Archdevil of his power to lose so badly twice.
Surely.
The silence hangs for a few heartbeats, and then the Archdevil cuts his losses and runs. Plotting a long and drawn out demise, probably. Swearing revenge, definitely. Acknowledging a scrawny little rogue as his match, oh, yes. Veron’s not quite sure what that equates to, in cosmic terms, but he doesn’t think it’s nothing. He’s seen the threads of fabric of the cosmos a bit too well to think that. He doesn’t quite know what it means, or what it might become, or the fundamental significance of it, but he knows it’s something. Maybe just the weight of a single feather on one side of a massive scale, or maybe something more. He sure doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he wants to.
As the fires die down and the smell of brimstone starts to get swept away by a breeze, he rubs the bridge of his nose. He feels a headache coming on. It's been a while since he's run on much more than spite and fumes. Right now he needs to find a quiet, mostly undestroyed inn. In it, he will sleep like a dead man. Then, when he feels just a bit more human, he'll help with the cleanup. It's the least he can do, anyway. For all the mess.